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If you’re like me, you probably dismissed it as another Facebook / MySpace / DearDiary.Net place to go hang out with your friends and play time-wasting Flash based games instead of having something of a real life. Indeed, I resisted the urge to login to Twitter for years. Occasionally someone would ask me if I was on Twitter and I’d dismiss them with a derisory snort and tell them to stop being ridiculous.

And then I had a meeting with Ailsa Page who asked me at one point whether I was on Twitter. Cue the derisory snort and while I had my mouth open to tell her to stop being ridiculous she stated, without so much as a grin, “You should be marketing yourself on Twitter – you’re missing a massive opportunity”.

So I figured I should check out this ‘massive opportunity’ for myself, which I did when I got back home that evening. My wife had already signed me up for an account a couple of days previously but I had not logged into it. That night I downloaded ‘Tweetie’ for my iPhone and had a look. I couldn’t really see the marketing potential in it at this point, although I since have.

But, more importantly, as a small business owner, who works with his wife in an office at the back of the house, we don’t have a great deal of interaction with other people except clients. Clients who expect us to be up to date with the latest technologies and trends. To this end I used to spend time trailing the ‘tech sites’ of the internet, looking at the BBC, SlashDot, Digg etc to keep up to date with the latest happenings in the tech sector – specifically the web design arena and PC/Mac Maintenance.

When I used to work in a bigger organisation, ideas used to migrate towards me spontaneously as a result of a chat with a colleague by the tea machine, or through one of the technical architects sending a group e-mail around. None of that happens when you work for yourself, and you have to go looking for these new things. That takes time, and when you’re in business for yourself, time most certainly is money. Or it’s much needed relaxation time. So the more time you spend researching new stuff, the less time you spend either making money or with your family.

Cue Twitter. If you’re clever about who you follow you can soon find lots of relevant new ideas flowing toward you spontaneously again. For example (and this might be a poor example because it’s going to be so big we probably would have heard about it eventually anyway) Google Wave did the rounds on Twitter recently. But instead of having to read through piles of stuff to filter out the good bits, each Twitter is only 140 characters long. That means the author has to give you a well thought out headline that captures your attention and gives you enough to decide you want to read the rest of an article, without having to read a whole slew of nonsense first. Time saved there then.

From our point of view, it’s the less well known technologies, the kind of things that don’t regularly make the mainstream news sites that matter to us. We’re huge WordPress fans, and we program it every day. But we aren’t able to go searching out for all the latest news, the best plugins, the most recent bugfixes every day. And you only find the big announcements on the tech sites. But on Twitter, there’s other people who are also heavy WordPress users. And when one of them finds something interesting there’s a good chance we will to. So we follow them.

The osmosis that began by the Vending Machine now occurs right on our desktop, through Tweetie for Mac. Or a Windows application if you’re so inclined (we’re not, but that’s a whole other story).

So, as well as using it to market ourselves, we’re finding Twitter is actually just as useful, if not more so, for keeping us up to date on the happenings in our industry. Instead of being a time waster, it’s actually a huge time saver. And we’ve not even tried to use it to market stuff yet – though by the time you read this article that’s probably not true any more. Indeed, you probably came here from one of our tweets!