There are many other tools that also let you post information and / or follow the information that your friends and colleagues are posting, including blogs and facebook.  I currently use all 3 (you can see the twitter feed I use to discuss my courses: here ). Furthermore, the importance of all of these social networking tools are discussed widely by many knowledgeable people, so I won’t reproduce that here. I will however offer three suggestions that I believe bear repeating:

1. This is a great way to find out information about a host of academic topics and researchers. However, be careful that you don’t limit yourself to these sources as there are still many important sources of information out there that you don’t want to overlook.
2. Think very carefully about your audience–both the people who will be following you, and those who won’t–when you post things.
   1. The people following you: I am often amazed at the things that people will say using a service like Twitter because it seems that they forget that their audience now includes their colleagues and professors and not just their friends. I’m not offended easily, but sometimes an incredibly unprofessional comment by someone in a social networking site does change my opinion of them, both for the better and the worse.
   2. The people not following you: Popular as they may be, these technologies are not being used by everyone. In my case, this means that I need to support alternative methods of notification when tweeting about my courses because not all of my students are on twitter. Depending on the kind of information that you are sharing, and the frequency with which you share it, this might turn out to be a rather large consideration.
3. Finally, I remind us not to over-use these tools simply because they are available and / or popular. Each of these tools has, like any other technology, very real and distinct affordances and constraints that influence the way that people use them, and how they can support activity. In the rush to use the newest most popular technology, I hope we won’t forget these basic principles of design.

In short, I remain a critical technophile in that I see some incredible potential to these kinds of technologies, but also want to make sure they are being used in thoughtful ways.