TwitterFeed is very handy (its creator Twitters @mario), and actually quite easy to use. And even better now that you can tell it to only post blog headlines rather than including characters from the post as well. (Initially that wasn’t the case. I’d actually created new RSS feeds to be used specifically for TwitterFeed, but I didn’t need them once that feature was added.)

The neat thing about Twitter–*a* neat thing–is that it can be used in lots of different ways. So just using it as an alternative announcement for one’s blog is fine, or you can supplement that with Twitter-only comments, or you can use it to have conversations with friends, or to report on an event or television show, or to (presumably its originally intended use) simply announce what you’re doing right now. You could embed your Twitter output from one or more accounts as microblogs on your blog, for example, to track, I don’t know…books read, or movies watched. So many possibilities. One account was Twittering the availability of washers and dryers in some college laundry room.

It’s interesting to watch what people come up with.

This is now my third attempt to reply to your comment, my previous two having been mysteriously wiped. I hope that this circumstance will demonstrate that my gripe is not with Twitter at all, but with my own inabilities!

I think I’m beginning to get my head around the whole thing – it helped when I realised that I’d plugged the blog URL rather than the feed into TwitterFeed – and can see that it could be a very useful resource. I think the next thing to do will be to send out some posts specifically on Twitter, rather than relying on the relay of the blog posts.

Thanks so much for your encouragement; it’s invaluable to hear from an expert Twitterer. Congratulations on Twitterlit, too – I’m a big fan.

Ellie, hoping against hope that this comment doesn’t disappear into the ether.

Do we have any avid mobile bloggers here?

Twitter is a bit baffling, that’s for sure. But, in the words of Twitter themselves: “Twitter is more fun when used through your mobile phone or instant messenger client.”

Its use, as I see it — apart from the social networking side and apart from the bigger fact that if some of [y]our readers want to receive [y]our words in X format then we should jolly well try to make sure that they can receive them in just exactly the format that they want — is to convert your blog entries into text messages.

You can use Twitter to natter to your mates and it is just as good as many other sites for that. But I don’t know of another site that will convert your blog to a text and send it to whoever has signed up to get it from you …

And if the BBC are playing with it …

markx