I agree in general with the good-tool notion, with this extension: most people don’t want tools. They want what the tools produce. I had no interest in a having a blog–till one day I realized I could use use that tool to solve a problem: my elderly parents got confused by email.

I created a blog just for them. I haven’t sent them email in three and a half years, but from their perspective I write 15 or 20 times a month.

Twitter fulfilled a need I didn’t know I had. I think we have many “a-ha” tools. But even if we don’t, think about what blogging enabled for you, Wendy. What is that awareness that we’re not so alone mean to us?

Prior to #lrnchat, I thought of Twitter simply as a playground for people with too much time on their hands, who thought far too highly of the value of their own random musings. But once I became networked with a group of learning industry thinkers, I suddenly tapped into a stream of up-to-the-minute news and resources unlike anything else I’ve ever experienced. Twitter has given me food for thought, ideas for building my business, a test bed for my own new ideas, and a place to gather supporting data to back them up. It’s started new conversations – like this one.

I’ve made new friends and reconnected with old acquaintances – and some of those I have quickly grown closer to as we’ve shared ideas and a few laughs. Our own little West Michigan lakeshore enclave isn’t exactly an eLearning hotbed, and I can’t overemphasize the awesome power I found in suddenly being able to crowd source friendships with people who share my background and interests – people who “get it,” and consequently, “get” me.

Okay, so Twitter can also be a major time suck, and a place to hang out to procrastinate in order to avoid doing something less interesting. And like with any new toy, it can be hard to ignore its siren song – as it is with my new “Crackberry,” especially with its Facebook ap. But whereas Facebook is truly an online playground for me and my friends, Twitter has become an encyclopedic index and market research tool.

Cheers!
~cfw

Still don’t use Twitter as effectively as you do – but it has enabled me to connect to more folks, get different (and more immediate) information, and synthesize in a way that forces me to get to the kernel of an idea.

For example, having a blog presence of any sort helped. Whenever someone wanted to find out about me, there was at least a publicly available body of self works that people could access to get a sense of my “self.” In having the blog, a handful of people like Brian Dusablon, Philip Hutchison and Ethan Estes were more frequent commenters on the blog, so as we all got on Twitter, we could exchange more than the work of writing a blog post, discovering there was a comment and then log in again to reply to a comment. Twitter was an accelerator for some exchange we were already trying to do.

Then, Twitter being used more widely helped as well. I started attending conferences and sought to connect to people who were at the conferences who were also using Twitter to some degree. Having connected in real life, there were some shared experiences that could support further online exchange with some context/history that was shared.

I’ve talked about connecting more with @mobilemind, whom I’ve known for a few years but never really bonded with until we discovered we each had a lot more in common than we thought. Similarly, as @moehlert and I started to bond through Twitter, in and of itself, I started following people he normally exchanged with and found that his friends, too, had much in common with me.

You leverage your interpersonal relationships as social support mechanisms. As long as you reciprocate and respect someone’s desire to keep their network small or quiet, this is exactly what you’re supposed to do.