I have a few ideas myself, but an interested in knowing what everyone else thinks about how twitter impacts the startup community, both positively and negatively. Feel free to comment below.
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I definitely think it’s beneficial… in fact, keeping in touch with the tech community around me is the primary reason I’m on twitter. Social reasons are a distant second. I like that it’s the only social network where I am connected with people I don’t actually know. For that reason, I get info I can’t get anywhere else. (and a lot of noise too…
I think it’s a plus on a few fronts. It helps provide a peer group (both social and professional) for people who are working on isolated little teams. For me, the biggest thing is the ability to engage with users (with a few choice RSS feeds from Summize).
I also think it’s a pretty painful distraction– 99% of tweeting really doesn’t “move the ball”, though it’s pretty entertaining.
Twitter is the reason that I know about half of the startup events that I do. I built my local tech community using Twitter and now I’m to the point where I can keep a pulse on that and see what events are popping up.
For somebody not at all involved in the startup community six months ago, it’s been a fantastic way to hop on board.
I think that it works rather well as a the universal tech watercooler, the thoughts and memes that are kicking around the different technology communities are able to spread.
For example in the indie mac development scene, a lot of the back channel on the iphone development and a lot of push back on the NDA that Apple is enforcing on the SDK is happening though peoples twitter accounts.
Any communication mechanism, when utilized by a community, is going to improve the flow of information therein, and improve the sense of community.
As for *startup* community, where things move very rapidly, I think it increases the speed of information flow.
I’ve had a fun little adventure with Twitter. One of the biggest pluses and one of the biggest weaknesses is how passive it is. You can follow me. Or not. I can follow you. Or not. You can reply to me. Etc…
Point being, How you use it doesn’t matter. It’s how others use it that will have an effect on your startup’s presence on Twitter. If 1,000 people followed the company I work for, then you bet we’d post to it a ton more. But for now, it’s not our main method of communication.
Twitter’s the whole reason I’m in Seattle, the reason I’m with Damon, and the reason I know pretty much anyone in Seattle, as I found out about Startup Weekend via Twitter (which was my first introduction to most of the Seattle tech people).
Heh, I still remember being in awe of the people wearing Saturday House shirts and wishing I could be cool enough that they would talk to me. (Seriously.)
In fact, my Twitter experiences have been SO important to me that I can no longer support microblogging within a silo and I’ve left Twitter to support federated microblogging tools. Irony.