Many Ways I Use Twitter

I am on and off on Twitter. But of late I am more on. Here is why. I found a bunch of uses of Twitter.

1. As a bookmarking tool (I started using it in addition to del.icio.us)
2. As a source for instant tech info - I follow some cool dudes like Dave Winer, Robert Scoble, Jon Udell, Dion Hinchcliffe, eHub and zdnet. I get a lot more than what I can handle in any given day
3. As a source of instant social news - I follow a bunch of friends and as the twit, I get hit
4. As an idealog - I just started this. Throw out ideas and someone will respond. A quick validation. Previously I used to blog about it (takes too much time), write it down (forget where it is), put it in a wiki (again takes too much time). I know that I can take these idea stream and work on some of them at some point in time.
5. I think some really cool stuff is happening with twitter as a collaboration tool. I followed Dion and team building a social graph app on Google engine (heard it through Dave’s posts)
6. Talk to myself. Read-pause-reflect an eternal spiral.
7. As a LearnLog (what did I do, why did I do it and when did I do it). Always amusing to see why work seems so much fun and after some time realize that you are kind of working but mostly having fun.

I think I will set some self imposed limits so that I do not become an addict. I haven’t figured out what they are yet. Here is my Twitter Account.

Update: The original title was Seven Ways I use Twitter. Then I though, why limit it? Why not keep adding new ones?

8. Purely for fun - it is kind of intoxicating

9. Just getting out “Ideas Worth Spreading” - a tag line of TED Talks, I love

10. As an advertisement for my blog? Mixed feelings about that.

Learning Agility

I stumbled into IdeaCast from HBR a couple of weeks ago. First of all I love the title “IdeaCast”. You can’t pass up a pod-cast series with such a title. Like Knowledge@Wharton podcasts, this is an invaluable source of information. One of the pod-casts I listened to recently is about the Changing Role of Leaders. In this podcast Marshall Goldsmith talks about five of the new traits of a Future Leaders. Then Marshall goes on to add another (saying that he got it from one of the readers who commented on his blog post). He calls it Learning Agility.

The term immediately appealed to me and I immediately Googled it. and found this link.

It describes the common traits of learning agile people.

• They are critical thinkers who examine problems carefully and make fresh connections with relative ease.
• They know themselves well, leverage their strengths effectively and know how to compensate for their weaknesses.
• They like to experiment and are comfortable with the discomfort that comes from change.
• They deliver results in first-time situations through team-building and personal drive.

The author identifies a set of related agilities that learning-agile people may have:

• Mental Agility -Ability to separate action from startegy and vision
• Results Agility - Personal drive and presence
• People Agility - Ability to build teams which includes Conflict Agility

I think Learning Agility is an important trait, for companies - especially startups. Most of the founders have it. A bigger challenge is to make it an essential ingredient of the startup culture.