Sometimes the tech requires multiple exposures to prove its utility. For me, twitter is a prime example. Login, post a snip of your life, share. It works. Twitter makes it easy to not only connect with others, but form a digital bond. I was completely ignorant to twitter prior to this summer. I had heard of people “tweeting” one another, but the significance of doing so was not apparent to me at the time. How would I use this, and why?

Enter BLC 2008 in Boston. I attended a presentation entitled. “The Power of Our Collective Intelligence”. It was brilliant. Through a traditional face-to-face networking exercise, we were forced to connect with at least three others in the room, and give them a business card, which contained our ning userid as well as our twitter id. Later that day, the twitter ids that I had collected were added to my twitter account. From those initial links, I was able to follow others in the education technology realm. Each day now begins with a quick login to twitter using either twhirl or feedalizr to see what everyone that I am following is up to. Most whom I follow I don’t know personally, aside from a brief encounter at the BLC conference. But the exchange is nontheless meaningful. Ideas flow freely. It is very liberating and empowering, and for me brings color and clarity to the utility of social networking tools like twitter.
Good technology encompasses utility and ease of use. Check out this talk by David Pogue, of the New York Times, entitled “Simplicity Sells”

Good technology is hard to find. When you do find some, make sure and share it!

On a related note, has anyone used Cuil as a search engine yet?  If so, tweet me with your thoughts.  I have seen opinions sway either direction about the search engine.  Time magazine seems to think Cuil is no threat to Google…yet.