What with Twitter being in the news lately, I thought it a good time to talk about this phenomenon.

Online Social Networking is superior to Physical Plane Networking in several keys way. It matters not if you have the latest designer wear or that you’ve just grown a rather large pimple on the tip of your nose. It has no travel or incidental costs such as food and drinks. The only cost is time. And it can be on your time. Being online eliminates the stress of not knowing what to say or saying the wrong thing because you have plenty of time to compose your response without anyone hanging their jaw or tapping the table, waiting for you to get it together

Social Networking allows you to skip over the introductions of What Do You Do and the endless questions to find out what you like. People can check your profiles first. With every tweet you leave, every wall you write on, every blog you comment on, you display who you are and what your passions are.

I admit I haven’t quite figured out the tactics. I have a feeling that much of Twitter is just about leaving messages, rather than getting into conversations. You can have real-time conversations but that means everyone has to be there at the same time. To me, that defeats one of the benefits. On Twitter they ask you what you’re doing. Top newsman Brian Williams said on The Daily Show the other night that he didn’t think he was ever doing anything interesting enough to put down. I always want to say, “What do you think I’m doing? I’m Twittering!” It is a good medium for spreading the news about something you’ve got going far quicker and cheaper than many other disseminating avenues. But unless you have a big event coming up, I’m not sure what you say. I guess you try to say something important, meaningful, witty.

I’ve come to see that it’s about having lots of little sweet candies to leave with others. Small, mouth-watering droplets. The younger folks, I think, have come to think more in these sound bites. It might be particularly well-suited to writers, but even those who are not so endowed can say what they need to say in short little bits. Twitter limits how many words you can use. So, it doesn’t take the time that most people fear it does.

I really like that this works by sharing what you know. The strategy seems to be to talk to and listen to a large number of people on topics that interest you. You spread a wide net for those you can collaborate with for things like getting together for drinks, working on a project together, supporting a cause or just helping each other.