When I first visited Twitter, it took me all of 30 seconds to decide it was uninteresting. I kept my persuasion for months as the buzz about Twitter kept growing. Last week, I changed my mind. Here is why I am now a twitterer – although a cautious one.

What is Twitter?
If you have been offline for months or if, like a growing number of my friends, you feel a need to protect yourself from even more tools, communities and swarms you need to keep up with, you might benefit from this short explanation before I go on to discuss the pros and cons of twittering:

Twitter is like a public instant messenger (IM) network, an instant social networking service or a kind of microblogging. This is called continuous partial presence. The idea is adding persistence to instant messaging and status messages.

The core of the concept of Twitter is to answer the question �What are you doing?� Twitter allows you to answer this question by posting one-line messages. These messages may be published by using the Twitter web interface, by using an instant messenger, or by way of SMS mobile phone text messaging.

You can limit who sees the messages to people you’ve explicitly added to your friends list, or you can make the messages public.

For a more detailed explanation of everything Twitter, have a look at the Newbie’s guide to Twitter.

Why?
My initial reaction was “Why?� Why would I bother posting tiny blurbs about my more or less trivial thoughts and actions when there are thousands of online opportunities to write continuous text – paragraphs, pages or even volumes of it – in a meaningful context and within a genre that supplies a common ground for interpretation?

A simple answer would be “It doesn’t have to be literature – it’s just a way of keeping in touch.� This might very well be the case, but I am already presented with more ways to keep in touch than I can handle without experiencing information overload.

The Passionate Blog has an interesting post about Twitter and the brain thrashing threshold.

Still, for me there were two things that tipped the scales in Twitter’s direction.

The first one is that a number of the blogs I follow are on Twitter now. Twitter can alert me when there are new posts at blogs and sites like Search Engine Land, Mashable and Technorati, among others. BBC and The New York Times are also present.

You can follow Pandia by searching for pandianews.

A good tip is to be really careful about who you choose to follow in Twitter. If the amount of updates climb to a certain level, I find that it ruins the experience for me.

The other winning point is that Twitter is integrated with IM. I would have thought that if I want to prevent (or at least ease) information overload, this would be a bad thing. But it’s not.

I don’t have to go visit Twitter to see what my friends are up to. I don’t have to go to Search Engine Land http://searchengineland.com/ to see what Danny is posting. All I have to do is take a look at the Twitter window in my IM client. And if I get the urge to share my latest little everyday victory, I can post it to twitter in the same window.

Will it last?
Blogger and web prophet Om Malik has decided that Twitter is already passé. I don’t have his crystal ball, so I have to say it is too early to tell. Personally, I find the way Twitter combines IM, blogging, and RSS very convenient and I find myself hoping it’s not a fad.

According to the statistics posted at Waxy, Twitter is still growing, and growing fast. It is just a matter of time before the growth slows down – probably a short time, given that time moves so very quickly online.

Twitter life hacking
One way of dealing with the strain of continuous partial presence is RSS. Your Twitter user account has an RSS stream, and if you add it to your RSS aggregator of choice, you can who’s been twittering and about what – when the time is right.

If you publish a Wordpress blog and want people to be able to follow it on Twitter, you don’t have to send an update for every post. In stead, install the Twitter Updater plugin.

If you don’t use IM but still want to follow Twitter and post what you are doing without visiting the web site, try Twitteriffic for Mac and Twitteroo for PC. Twapper is a Twitter client for mobile phones.

Links and further reading
Follow Pandia on Twitter
Lifehack: 5 ways to use Twitter for good
Web Worker Daily: Eight ways Twitter is useful professionally
Slacker Manager: The Several Habits of Wildly Successful Twitter Users
The Twitter Fan Wiki