I'll assume for the moment that you've never heard of Twitter. First, that would mean that my mother has beaten you to knowledge of something related to technology. More to the point, though, Twitter is a service that connects people and limits communication between them to 140 characters per message -- no more. Beyond that, it's hard to find a decent explanation of what the service is actually used for.
As a result, mentioning Twitter will often yield a response best qualifies as a loathsome "Why would I care about what someone is eating for breakfast or when they are taking a shower?" Mentioning Twitter to someone familiar with the service, though, will often yield a surprisingly positive response. In my informal and completely non-empirical study, I've talked to people who have embraced Twitter as a simple, informal means of communication with people that were loathe to utilize other "revolutions" in social networking like MySpace, Facebook, and so on. The primary difference between Twitter and these other services is the informal and simplistic nature of adding new people to your feed; adding someone new isn't a major commitment, you don't have to worry about protocol for "following" them (your follow list is a list of people you'd like to see updates from). If you follow someone, unless they disable the feature, they'll get an e-mail saying that you have followed them and then that person can look at the kind of updates you write and decide for themselves if they want to reciprocate.
A quick usage note: there is a tendency for people to follow anyone who follows them out of courtesy; I recommend against this as a blind rule. As soon as you start adding people who write about what they're having for lunch or what color the sky in their neighborhood is in the morning, the usefulness, and subsequently your enjoyment, of the service will start to dissipate. Twitter's purpose is highly dependent on what you, as the user, want to make of it. If you add everyone you can in a rush to try and increase the number of people you're following with the hope that people will suddenly follow you and you will have made your experiment with the service a success, the only thing you're going to likely see is a sea of vapid and uninteresting updates from people you have no connection to.
When I started using Twitter more than a year ago, I wasn't really sure what kind of mileage I would get out of it. It was basically a service that allowed me to broadcast 140 character messages to a bunch of my friends at once. As I discovered more and more game developers, journalists, and gaming sites/outlets on Twitter, though, my feed started transforming into a legitimately useful source of up-to-the-minute news and information from all around the world. Once that started happening, my personal usage of Twitter went from a couple messages every few days to numerous messages in a single day whenever I had a few minutes at work and home depending on what I was working on, what game I was playing, what news story I just read that I wanted to comment on and share with people, and so forth. I switched from using the website to using an actual client (Twhirl and Witty are my favorites) at some point and once I did that, I had an outlet for random thoughts that I'd condense into 140 characters and broadcast to anyone who was interested. I've just been doing this almost every day for the last year, accumulating new people to follow, having new people follow me, and not only getting exposed to a bunch of really random and new stuff every day that I may not have ever seen otherwise, but casually met a whole bunch of cool people within the game industry. Examples:
- Jonathan Mak (Creator of Everyday Shooter): "made new entities to be more musically controllable with respect to gameplay. SH says "not only does it sound like music, it IS music.""
- Steve Gaynor (Game Designer at 2k Marin): "file under 'more signs that new games need to be less expensive at retail' http://is.gd/lVOr"
A lot of these people are game industry figures that may or may not have their every comment and thought echoed by the gaming press in enormous, blinking text. They're people in the game industry who have interesting or entertaining things to say about game development, game journalism/writing, playing games, or any other random comment that they may decide to echo on Twitter. The service is a superb way to get information about facets of the game industry on a moment-by-moment basis -- as opposed to in a formal article or forum post -- from some of the less well-known figures that make up the industry. It's also a great service for having impromptu conversations, as succinct as they are forced to be by the 140 character limit, between people that may never have found out about each other if not for the loose network of individuals that forms out of usage of Twitter.
A few months ago, Sam Houston of GamerDNA decided to put together a list of game industry figures and companies that were using Twitter so that anyone interested in game industry happenings could have a one-stop location for a huge list of people and Twitter names that they could add to their personal feed. That project turned out to be such a successful idea that he ended up making a site out of it and he appears to be updating the list of people regularly. The site is: Game Industry Tweet.com.
I encourage anyone who thinks any of this sounds interesting to follow some of the individuals listed on the site. The companies and community managers that use Twitter aren't inherently less interesting, but I like to think of (and use) Twitter when the people I read updates from are not doing it as part of their job description. It's a bunch of people who, presumably, are interested in the same things that you are, and with a little bit of searching and customization, Twitter can end up being an oft-updated feed of information or thoughts from people who share your own interests.
