I signed up for Twitter several months ago and couldn't see what all the fuss was about. I gave it a bit more attention this past week and wow! I can see the value.

Twitter is instant messaging, broadcasting, and community all rolled into one. I love the ability to keyword search tweets and how it integrates with other programs and the iphone. With the smartphone boom just beginning applications that are only of use on a computer will suffer and that may include our forums.

I think Twitter needs to used somehow in a visible way and not hidden away in profiles. I have not given it much thought as to what that would be.

I also beleive that somehow our forum communities need to be made more smart phone friendly so members have little trouble reading and responding to posts using their phones. Perhaps all that needs is a separate CSS which comes into play when the forum is accessed by phone - I dont know. That is for those smarter than I to figure out

Im new to this Fourm but not so new to web development and IT thingamagigs.

My thoughts however on Twitter are that it seems to be mostly for celeberties who want to remain valid and connected with their audiences. As for the rest of us....nobody cares what we think. atleast not in 150 characters.

The smartphone compatiablity idea is excellent. As the smartphone takes more of the market share of internet use there are a lot of developers scrambling to become not only compliant, but relevant. Im sure the powers that be are working on this. However keep in mind that the smartphone is not the end all be all of things. I'm sure we will see technology down the road that could change the way we communicate again. The web and how its used seems to be ever changing, but even more so as of the past few years. Very exciting times in deed.

Back to the tweet, Im not sure that it's exactly whats needed to make this Forum cutting edge. To me Twitter seems like a fad.

I use twitter and facebook to blast out quick announcements with links back to my forum to draw people in. I don't have many followers on twitter yet as most of my membership "just doesn't get it" but my facebook group is growing by about 100 users a month, just passed 800, and it seems to be helping bring more traffic to my site, and the users seem to like the wya I am putting it to use.

side note on twitter, even id you don't tweet anything, follow your local news, deal sites, etc.
I am a bargain hunter, and follow techbargains, techdealdigger, amazondeals, livehotdeals, woot. I find awesome prices on stuff all the time.
I also follow a few TV shows, tech news sites, etc.. Ill add them, and if they don't post anything useful, I drop them, or just ignore them, yet stay following them just to show my support (castle and chuck)

I am using Twitter to tweet out a couple of thread titles each day. (with links back to the threads) I figure that anyone searching Twitter for the subjects of the threads will find my tweets and visit my forum. Only a few dozen followers so far but I am thinking of this exercise as a way of generating new members - not so much for the benefit of existing members.

BTW, twitter is great for small updates, even if you "tweet" a part of the update and link to the full version of the page it will do wonders for keeping people up to date

hmmm, I do have personal blog but don't have Twitter. But I agree, blogging is more time consuming and not really describe what you are doing. Twitter is more simple.

I consider forums to be social media just like blogs and Twitter so to have them all work together is really the way things are going.

If you write a blog post in your wordpress blog there are plugins that allow for that post to be Tweeted to followers. It would be nice if new forum threads could be easily tweeted as well.

Also, avatars follow people around from site to site (using gravatar.com) - perhaps the same should apply for forums.

Forums will need to get on board with the rest of the social web.