Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

I hate twitter without passion. It is by and large the most boring new exciting thing I have ever had the courtesy to witness. It made facebook seem much better.

While we are on that topic I will rant...
If you are on Facebook and you have friended someone (me) and the other party (me) has accepted, do not just post your own stuff/thoughts/topics and never comment on anyone else's items (everyone else not just me). That is freaking rude beyond typed words.
So many self promoting (word that means self centered but not as nice to hear goes in here) have just ruined freaking facebook.

This situation is different if your some foodie legend and I seek you out to friend you, then I can be a groupie and understand the rules of the situation.
BUT if you go and seek out persons to friend who you recognize say from SE and you do not comment on their daily somethings off and on your not a friend your a self promoting (that word again).

Over on Facebook we are a bit finicky so if you are there and you want to lurk, fine go ahead and lurk but do not promote yourself as friends (not fan pages or groups) if you are just looking to pad your outreach. This is total bullshit and I am calling it.

You bet! I love Twitter.

I'm not tweeting about what I'm doing every second of the day - I agree, that's totally boring; who cares if I'm "sitting on the porch." Instead I use it for business and promoting my recipes/articles.

I also use it to keep in touch with chefs, news folks, and fellow foodies. For the most part, I accept food related followers only and try to just keep everything I write related to food.

@dawnviola

just another cheap marketing tool. not interested.

I don't nearly do anything exciting to twitter about...walked dog, picked up kids at bus, etc.
I do facebook and think it's hilarious. I do agree there are some "friend" stalkers out there but they usually out themselves in conversation. I get a big kick out of people who friend you but you would never speak to each other in public--can you tell I live where I grew up--life is so high school.

Nope. Can't think of anybody other than my family who cares what I'm up to. Just did a load of laundry, took the dog to the dog park, dog just took a dump, home now, chopping onions.........Yikes I'm boring myself.

I'm on it, and most of my industry is now (finally). I've found it a great way to meet people who are passionate about what they do and who they are; for me, it's a networking tool that turned into a big cocktail party of well-informed, generous people.

My handle on it is @efslattery, so feel free to look me up and mention SeriousEats. :)

Frankly, after moving to a new place every two years, I'm happy to have a tool that lets me connect to people with similar interests. Most food bloggers I know have found it to be valuable.

@orchidgirl/Olga: Seems like you've already made the decision to get on Twitter to at least try it out, so I'll skip whether it's useful or interesting or dumb as a sack of hammers. I've found that it's all of the above.

To answer your username question ... If you're only going to use it for your food stuff, as you state, it might be useful to grab "mangoandtomato," or, better yet, "mangotomato" (3 fewer characters—shorter usernames are best if you're hoping people will "retweet" your links/thoughts/tweets). If you find you like Twitter and want to blab from a more personal perspective, you can always take out a second account that's closer to your actual name or to your "orchidgirl" screen name. (You can then use one of a number of Twitter applications to manage multiple accounts.)

JerzeeTomato hits one something that is at once useful for publishers/bloggers but that can also get really annoying—the fact that almost every damn person on Twitter uses it for self-promotion. We use it as such, too, on our @seriouseats account.

I'm not going to lie, it has become an effective way to increase reach and alert readers to new links. As the main tweeter for @seriouseats, I'd like to think we balance the blatant self-promo stuff with a nice mixture of cool links to other food-related material (often stuff that we may or may not blog about on the homepage of Serious Eats). And we use it as a way to pass on behind-the-scenes news, if there is any (say, site-maintenance issues) and to communicate with readers and friends.

So for a publication, it can be used as a promo tool, an emergency alert service, and/or as a sort of supplemental microblog (The Atlantic Food Channel uses it almost exclusively as a microblog—@atlantic_food).

When I started tweeting (as @Slice), I mixed personal and blog stuff, since for me, they were one and the same, but eventually I realized it probably wasn't cool to subject followers to "Angry Old Man" rants when they were probably there for pizza information. So I decamped to a personal account where I can yell at kids from my virtual front porch. There, I sit on my ratty old couch and tweet mostly with friends and about my bowling scores—absolute shite that nobody in their right mind would want to read.

I've also found that it's often the best way to get in touch with me, since the desktop Twitter client I use (Seesmic) gives me audible alerts anytime someone "@ messages" any of the Serious Eats accounts or my personal account. I have it running in the background and am like a Pavlov's dog, checking messages whenever I hear that ping. It also helps that I have it on my phone, too (Birdfeed for the iPhone), so when I'm out and about and have time to kill, I scan through the various accounts to see what people are talking about.

Going back to Jerzee's thoughts on Facebook self-promo, she does touch on a point when she mentions it's a different situation for her if she's chosen to follow particular food nerds who can be expected to self-promote via these social-networking tools. You can unfollow or defriend people if they get annoying. Lord knows I don't hold it against anyone who might defriend/unfollow my nonsense. That said, there are a number of food-world people whose Facebook and/or Twitter feeds mix self-promo with truly interesting stuff. I'm thinking right now of David Lebovitz, whose Facebook wall (http://www.facebook.com/davidlebovitz) is often full of interesting links to things other than his own stuff—though as I type this, most of his recent links have been to davidlebovitz.com.

Anyway, how you eventually end up using Twitter is up to you, of course, but keep in mind what Jerzee says about interaction. It does help mitigate the self-promo if you are having a conversation with people instead of using it as just another tool to shout at them.

(And, by the way, I often find fun links on Jerzee's FB and have "liked" a good amount of stuff she's posted. Oh, and I have her to thank for some of the ridic quizzes I've taken after she's posted her own results.)

Last, here's a post I did last year that's sort of a small directory of food bloggers using Twitter, if you want to connect with other foodos there: A List of Food Bloggers Using Twitter. That's obviously incomplete, but you'll find that once you start following a handful of active tweeters, you'll start seeing who they're "talking" to via "@" messages and can discover new people that way.

</rant>

I'd been reluctant to join twitter, yet read many tweets by people I like. Finally I caved and joined.

As a result, I get links to many, many, articles, comments, videos pertaining to subjects I care about(food politics, food, restaurants, Portland). A lot of these I never would have found on my own because the interweb is huge.
A few chefs also sometimes post photos of menu changes and that's interesting to me.

I try to re-tweet stuff of importance and also contribute to important conversations. I try never to be like the twitter tracker sketch on Conan and post about waiting for my latte.

I think it's silly. Unless you're a person of note (and I use that term loosely), how self absorbed do you have to be to think the average person really cares about your 140 character musings on how you hate traffic and what you ate for breakfast?

Thanks everyone for your comments/suggestions/vents.
Somehow I assumed everyone would be in love with Twitter :)

Adam, big thanks for taking your time to write such a detailed response! I'll definitely take a look at your link for beginners.

Olga

No, I don't twit.

(Yes, I know it's tweet, but I had to steal that hilarious phrase from one of my scatterbrained coworkers...)

I've never even been to the site. Any man who "twitters" might as well just go ahead and start wearing panties.

@linecook
@gachatz
@tournant

I don't use Twitter at all - I don't even text (I was getting too many spam text messages that I had to pay for. Because my cell-phone provider has an all-or-nothing policy regarding texting, and because no one I know would text me anyway, I just disabled it altogether).

I'll vouch for Kuban's Twitter...highly entertaining, and I don't even know the guy...

I find it's good for "getting to know" the people behind the blogs, and in some cases, it ends up that you actually meet them! Also good for quick recommendations, questions, etc—what to order at this place tonight, where to find a certain ingredient, etc. Actually kind of love it. (I'm at @maggiejane)

eatlocallondon is exactly right. People think Twitter is for talking about the boring parts of your life. Yeah, you're all right - no one wants to know if you're sitting on the porch. However, if you are running a business, blog, etc. then it can be useful. The Zappos CEO does a great job of mixing business and personal. @zappos if you're interested.

@shamefree - my name, mostly music stuff but of course some good food stuff thrown in also. :)

You don't have to Twitter only about what you're doing, you know. I rarely do. Often I'll use it as a sounding board for ideas, or a place to wonder (food-related) things aloud and often get responses from people who know what they're talking about (I follow a lot of chefs). It's also decent for promotion of my art and my blog, and quite honestly if it weren't for Twitter I wouldn't know any of the totally awesome people (fellow food bloggers) I've met (in person and all) since I moved to New York. It's pretty invaluable for food bloggers (or any bloggers, probably) in that we can get to know each other much quicker than we would have by just reading and commenting on each others blogs over several months.

I have a twitter account and don't have the faintest notion of wth to do with it. At first, I thought it was for use with phones, then I saw people using computers, then I just realized I'm spread too thin as it is. I've pretty much bailed on myspace because my non-code-friendly friends won't touch it.. I use my page to contact a few hard core ms friends who refuse to come to FB.

FB, IMO, is a treasure chest of friends from nearly every era of my life - all in one place. I've enjoyed catching up with old friends, some of whom I had lost all hope I'd ever know again. It's been a joy for me. I can live without all the Mafia wars and Farmtown bullshit and wish there were a way to permanently block those annoying "apps." FB is like a rolling bulletin board where any of your friends may tack a virtual post it note to your "wall."

Between coming here to SE, FB, filtering through e-mail and other hobbies and clubs to which I belong, my time is non-existent. I'm not sure if frequenting twitter is really necessary.