I find myself checking Twitter more than usual during a slow work shift–fascinated by the number of people who tweet at the workplace. Curious, I asked one enthusiastic Twitter friend in advertising industry about her increased Twitter use from nine to five. She wrote:

Twitter at work is kind of like voice mail for me. Sometimes, chatting or talking/texting on my cell phone is not the best, so I use Twitter—discretely. You don’t expect an immediate response as you do with instant messaging, and that’s fine. If you need to get a hold of me, tweet. I’ll definitely get back to you.

Perhaps Twitter can be useful at work–and not a browser window you close quickly when the boss walks by your desk. Avoid getting overwhelmed with work emails, tweet to your co-workers when you need a response to a quick question or when you want to share something.

Stuck at the reference desk during the showdown debate between Sarah Palin and Joe Biden, I was glued to the Twitter Election feed to stay up to date with what both candidates had to say. Tweets from Twitter users from both parties appeared so fast it was hard to keep up.  After that evening, I was hooked—a loyal Twitter user.

Sadly, the election is over; and I’ve lost my “I Voted” sticker, the only tangible reminder of my participation in the political process. While it is not the same as that silly sticker, my TwitVote will remain in my feed.

TwitVote, a mock opinion poll, counted Twitter users’ votes and provided them with the option to tweet about their presidential choice.

The final result echoed the real election results (with a slightly larger majority):

• Obama: 20967 tweets.
• McCain: 3427 tweets.

A simple outlet for many users to share their ideas and concerns, let’s hope for more unofficial Twitter polls in the future.

But what if you have an account…

• for your professional life
• your personal life
• your alter ego
• to tell jokes
• that claims you’re Dwight Schrute

The answer is that you can’t! Gasp!  Twitter isn’t set up so you can be logged into multiple accounts and post from said accounts, or, and here comes the interesting part, post to multiple accounts at the same time.  But, we don’t hold this against Twitter.  They’ve got enough on their plates trying to keep the fail whale from flying in from time-to-time.

So cue a couple other major players, specifically Carsonified.  Who is Carsonified?  A group web design geniuses, that’s who.  They put on major conference like FOWA, FOWD, and FOM.  Odd acronyms, but visit the sites – you might add them to the list of go-to conferences next to that ubiquitous Information Today gig.  These guys took the Twitter API and mixed it up with my favorite flavor of Javascript, jQuery, and some other fancy pants programming to create the killer Twitter app.

Oh, did I mention they did it in a week?  Yea.  Rockin’.

It’s called Matt (short for multi-account twitter tweeting) and it allows you to do those things Twitter doesn’t:

• Be logged into multiple accounts at once (several, like probably more than 20 if you really wanted)
• Tweet from one account or cross tweet from multiple accounts
• Only log in with one account – not all 20 plus – but still have the ability to post to any account you want

The downside: It doesn’t give you a stream of Tweets from your followers and those you follow.  But hey, if they did that they’d be replacing Twitter!

Go.  Enjoy.  Tweet peacefully.

http://www.themattinator.com/

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGStmHaf2bM

Check it out: Twitter Vote Report

I was also following attendee mstephens7 who was taking notes and jotting ideas via the feed.  He switched between making announcements to followers of keyword #IDEA2008 (by inserting this into a post, followers can search by keyword and view all posts that include #IDEA2008) and his own “personal” notes that are public to all followers.

I wasn’t present at the conference, but it was an interesting way to stay up-to-date on its proceedings.  Note-taking via Twitter is an interesting concept that should incited future discussion.