As recorded here, I started Tweeting a bit less than a fortnight ago. (Handle is @francismoran, if you’d like to follow me.) Today, I want to come up for air as I barely tread water in the Twitterstream and share a few first impressions.

1. Twitter is the most addictive thing since crystal meth was synthesized, and it has precipitated a massive relapse in my online behaviour.

I am an easily distracted guy at the best of times. So over the past few years, I have instituted some processes in my work life to diminish the potential that my focus on the task at hand will be derailed by incoming emails, news feeds or other bright shiny objects. I turned off all email alerts, stopped using instant messaging services and schedule specific times in my day when I will deal with email, my RSS feed and the like.

Then along came Twitter. At the office, at home, waiting for my Clover at Bridgehead, at the breakfast, lunch and dinner tables, at red lights while driving … hell, almost anywhere and at any time of the day, I MUST check Twitter and see what the ‘Stream is bringing me. It’s obsessive, and I’m actively seeking therapy.

2. Twitter is also incredibly seductive.

I wrote that I intended to use Twitter not as a sort of ersatz IM tool, or as a way to stay in touch with friends, or to post self-promoting updates about what airport I was now landing at. Nope. Twitter, for me, was going to be strictly business. I intended to use it to tweet about things not worth a full blog post, to draw attention to interesting things that came through my RSS reader, to promote great content secured by one of our clients here at inmedia, and to participate in Twitter conversations.

Well, it was that last one that pulled me in. (Right now, I’m channelling Al Pacino’s character in Godfather II.) Before I knew it, I was giving grammar tips, talking about what I’d name my boat if I had one, and, most un-businesslike of all, posting pictures of myself on a Jamaican beach.

3. Twitter has really goosed our blog traffic

It hasn’t all been obsession and personal indulgences, though. While the data points are still relatively few in number, we saw a tidy spike in blog traffic last week, with visitors up about 25 per cent from the weekly average for the previous month, page visits up 80 per cent and a 10-per-cent increase in subscribers. And Twitter has become the third-best source of referral traffic to our blog. All in less than two weeks. Nice.

4. The tools are a bit bewildering

Selecting a Twitter client has been a bewildering exercise. Initially, I started off both reading and posting directly on the Twitter site, hitting F5 every time I wanted a fresh deluge of tweets. Of course, as any member of the Twitterati knows well, there is a plethora of clients that can be installed.

I’ve been testing TweetDeck. It’s okay, but its constant pings are just too demanding on my too-fleeting attention span. Maybe I’ll play around with TweetDeck a bit more and explore its greater functionality but for the moment, I think I’ll continue to use my browser on my desktop.

I’m on my third client for my mobile platform, the iPhone. And it’s here that my obsessiveness really runs amok anyway. I’ve been using the free iStore application TwitterFon for the past several days. I really like the interface, especially how it uses colour to categorize incoming tweets and shows all replies whether or not I follow the person replying. Conversation threads are also very easy to follow. I think I’ll stick with this one. Until a brighter, shinier one catches my eye…

5. @snolen takes the prize for best Twitter Stream this first two weeks

The Globe and Mail’s excellent Stephanie Nolen, who was recently reassigned from the paper’s Africa bureau to its India bureau, kept up a steady stream of live tweets reporting on the Dalai Lama’s speech to his followers marking yesterday’s 50th anniversary of his flight into exile from Tibet. This is the future, kids.

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