Twitter is an interesting tool. For those of you who have never heard of it, it revolves around the central theme “What are you doing?” Most social networks like Facebook have this feature ingrained. However, Twitter’s strength is that it just revolves around this one tagline and is able to generate conversation on what we are doing. Its combination of text messages, mobile web and external applications makes one always connected.
Through Twitter I have already met a long list of interesting people of which I’ve also met a number offline. There are many ways in which to effectively use this tool. Here are mine:

1. I engage in conversation. There are a few people whose twittering I specifically read and answer. Thus, you can add many people to twitter, but make a selection of the people who are conversation starters. This leads to the next point.

2. Of course, you do not want to ignore anyone else replying to your updates. There are two ways to deal with this.
- Subscribe to Twittermail. It gives me a unique email address and sends replies back into my inbox. In case, I miss an update it always ends up in my inbox.
- Twittermail is, however, delayed, so in case something demands an immediate reply I use tracking on my cell phone. I track my own @username, so all replies are sent to my cell phone. Well, Twitter is still buggy, so you may miss some of them but most end up on my phone, and otherwise there is twittermail as backup.

3. A good way to look for friends/interesting people is to use the search option. Search e.g. for a location, profession or interest. Browsing other people’s friends list (click the with_others tab) is also useful for this.

Good luck.