twitter actually useful?

I know – it doesn’t sound right. Most right-thinking people look at a site like Twitter and think “fad” and “stupid tool to soothe the egos of narcissistic politicians and Gen Y”. Trust me: in 2 years time, Twitter will be so 2009.

Because, really, who wants to know what I, or anyone else, am doing at any one point in time? My family might, occasionally, my friends and workmates – from time to time. But it’s pretty limited. If they want to know what I’m thinking, they can just ask.

So, I’m not a fan.

That being said, I’ve just stumbled on a little tool that uses twitter that’s actually moderately useful. It’s called TweetTabs.

Give it a go.

You can click on the top topics, and it will show you all the tweets on that issue. You can also search for something that interests you, and then all the tweets mentioning that will show up, as they happen.

For example, I searched for “Gold Coast Marathon” and I discovered a bunch of people feeling nervous or excited, including Anna Bligh, the Premier of Queensland.

There, that was useful wasn’t it?

Running
9km scheduled with a friend this lunchtime. I’ll do another 6 km tomorrow, and that’ll be it before the big day.

Nerves
I’m starting to get butterflies in the stomach, although it could be breakfast not agreeing with me. I remember the night before the Melbourne Marathon in 2007, my stomach was so queasy I could barely force down dinner and sleep was VERY difficult. Nerves are good, but there are limits. This race is different to normal, as there are a whole lot of extra things to get stressed about – flights, accomodation, picking up the race pack, blah blah blah.

Note to self: must chill out.