I have to admit that when I first saw twitter, I had a few thoughts, more or less in this order:

1. This is stupid and a waste of time
2. This is IRC "2.0" with mobile support
3. The txtmsg kids are gonna love this
4. I wish I had thought of it

Given that I had not thought of it, I've never been into IRC, and I'm not a txtr, I pretty much ignored it. Until this week... 

Background

Over the last week, I read Ship It! A Practical Guide to Successful Software Projects. I highly recommend this book to anyone who is involved with software development, as it is a quick read and hits on a number of great Agile ideas without espousing any formal methodology (i.e. Scrum). One practice that was new to me is sending out "Code Change Notifications" - simple summaries of what changes have been checked into the source control.

My initial gut feel was that it would be a waste of time, but their anecdote made me re-consider. In this anecdote, a couple developers on a distributed team have spent a day or so working on improving the performance of some section of code. When they have tweaked the code as much as they can, they check in their code, and send out a notification to the entire team. Another developer on the team, in another location, reads the notification. It turns out that this person has a background in high-performance algorithms, and is able to quickly review the code change, and re-work it for a 10 fold increase in performance.

Setting aside the fact that there is some misapplication of resources on this team, if the notification had not been sent out, the opportunity for this substantial improvement would not have occurred. Sending out the notifications basically pings the collective experience of the team. Most times little will come of it, and as long as the opportunity cost for sending out the notification is low (i.e. automated as part of the code check-in process), and it's quick to read, this still nets out positive if there is some occasional input.

Twitter in the Mix

Taken in this light, I now see twitter as a platform for real-time pinging the collective experience of a community. If someone fires out a "tech tweet" about what they are working on, maybe one person who just worked on something similar sees it and fires back an idea that changes your entire outlook on the problem. At the very least it's worth a try.

Since someone has to start this off, so as of Monday, I started simply sending out quick tweets relating to what I'm working on at any given time. This will be only technical stuff - no off-topic minutiae. If you want to follow along, you can view the feed here http://twitter.com/dbouwman, or sign up with Twitter, and have tweets sent to your IM or Phone.

Obviously there are scalability issues here - I don't want to get 1000 tweets a day, nor would anyone else, but that problem is quite a ways into the future. For now, let's see if this is useful