I’ll try watching Twitter with a good client.

P.S. Also gotta check out points made in this blog post – there’s useful comments there:
http://www.gameproducer.net/2009/05/18/twit-this-twit-that/

If you use a Twitter client, such as TweetDeck, private conversations like that won’t be shown to you, only general things or tweets that are @you. Without a good client, Twitter is not very user friendly. :) The beautiful thing is, it can be integrated seamlessly in most tools.

For example, the FireFox plugin TwitterBar lets you share a cool link with a click of a button (next to the URL).

A) It is faster than google reader for syndicating blog posts – if people tweet their post it will show up on twitter before google.

B) I follow friends and people I admire – so there is only 10 or so people I follow, and if you tweet more than 5 times a day I’m likely to remove you. Yes, there can be too much noise.

C) Because I only follow friends and people I admire I’m more likely to follow the links that they post and recommendations that they make.

D) I use it as a journal, no I don’t tweet what I had for breakfast, but I do if I solved a hard programming problem, or finished a good that I liked or acomplished something, anything – even if it’s small that way I can look back and see what I did when.

E) You can ask questions and get human responses to your questions – google is great, but it is a machine.

F) I’m quite into the indie music scene and lots of musicians are using twitter to give special ‘inside’ information to their fans – free links to mp3s, limited tickets to shows etc…

@GreyAlien where? :)

and another:

@aeriagames sure

So, do I also have to follow these people to get something out of those conversations? Tweets like this make me wary of following someone’s feed. Instead of feeling like I’m part of a community, I feel the complete opposite, like I’ve been shut out of a conversation. Maybe I still don’t get it. Seems like about as much fun as listening to one person on the phone.

One more use: I have seen Twitter being used as a help desk and for reputation management.

One time I mentioned a book I have read and the company that publishes it quickly responded and re-tweeted.

Another time the CEO of a company thanked me for helping out people on their forums. It might sound corny but stuff like that is just awesome for your audience.

Translating this to game production, companies could converse directly and live with their fans and prospects and involve them, give updates on bugfixes and new versions, what’s happening inside and all of that.

And another use: People find jobs on Twitter. If a game company has a job opening it could offer the job on Twitter. There are many people who’d love to test-play games before the public beta opens. :-)

You might want to use hootsuite instead of tweetdeck alone as it’s ow.ly links allow you to track click counts as well as put adsense in the pages (without annoying the user).

I think this would be one of the best ways to monitor the click rate effectiveness of twitter and I’ll be interested to know this too!

http://hootsuite.com