Why I Love Twitter

I’ve tried many a time to describe and show how Twitter works but a lot of my friends and family just don’t get the attraction.  In fact I’d even go as far as to say I’m regularly mocked over my twitter usage (and I’m not *that* heavy a user either!).

One example on the Saturday just gone through just demonstrates the differences between the likes of Facebook and Twitter and why it will always be viewed as an essential tool/means of communication for me. It also clearly demonstrates one particular use of Twitter that I adore.

Now, I love Facebook and I use it to keep in contact with a lot of old friends and a lot of family throughout the world who I would otherwise never really get to correspond with frequently. Twitter is truly different though in the immediacy of responses and this aspect is what clearly puts it above the other social networks with respect to interacting with your peers.

So, here I was Saturday morning, waking up in a Limerick hotel with a relatively bad hang-over. It had been a good idea at the time; A great night out on the town saying goodbye to a lot of colleagues who have recently left or would be the following week due to redundancies.

What I needed was a decent breakfast but not really living in Limerick, where could I find a great ‘greasy spoon’ in the centre of the city to have a decent fry?

A number of options were open to me:

1. Have the Hotel’s breakfast (inevitably overpriced for a buffet and probably luke-warm by the time I’d come down)
2. Ask someone in the street for a recommendation
3. Pot Luck
4. Ask my 207 followers (a number of whom would know Limerick far better than I) where a decent greasy spoon was?

I opted initially for the last one to see what I’d get back, so at 0934 Saturday morning, as I was about to check out, I tweeted “Anyone recommend a good greasy spoon in the centre of limerick??” .

Two things then happened very quickly (all within 10 minutes): -

Within 4 minutes Damien Mulley, a large presence in the blogging community here in Ireland, “ReTweeted” my question to all of his followers (all 939 of them)

5 minutes later, Alexia Golez suggested The Wild Onion on High Street. 3 minutes later Tommy Collison also recommended The Wild Onion and even supplied me with the phone number so I could ring ahead. Also two other people I don’t follow (from Damien’s follower’s) also recommended the Wild Onion.

So with four recommendations, it was sold to me. So off I went in search of The Wild Onion on the High Street.

This is a very typical use of Twitter and very often this type of interaction and usefulness of such as immediate Social Network isn’t clearly apparent. It’s in one way, a live search engine. You ask a question, and real people will answer your question or pass it onto people who will know the answer.

Suffice to say, I found The Wild Onion (which by the way I would NEVER have found had it been down to pot luck, it’s tucked away and you’d never know about it if you didn’t know about it beforehand). The food was bloody fabulous and I happily walked back to by car feeling far more human for the long drive to West Cork.