At first blush, especially if you don't take the time to find someone who has something real to say, Twitter can seem silly as you found ["This techie's a-twitter," The Chief, April 24].
However, for a community limited to 140 characters per post, I've found plenty of very literate, thoughtful people to follow and talk with there.
There are a number of ways to do this. I tend to start by finding my friends on Twitter and following them. And I'll generally unfollow them if there's too many "I'm going to brush my teeth now" type of nothing posts. (Though as a friend I might suggest how they could be more interesting.)
One way to find interesting people is to go to the site and search on something like Squamish. When I do that, I find SquamishWeather ("Squamish's WX by Jason R Severe Weather Watcher for the Meteorological Service of Canada"), WhistlerFacts (also self-explanatory), a bicyclist looking to meet up with folks to bike for coffee on Saturday morning, a local realtor, references to articles from your lovely newspaper, TourismSquamish, and others.
Mind you, this might be in part from your article, as the last time I searched on Squamish I don't recall nearly this much.
My point, though, is that you use the search to find people who look interesting, read through what they've already posted to see if they've got something to say more often than not, and you follow them. If they're lame, you unfollow them. You watch conversations go by among the people you follow and start following the interesting people they're talking to, and so on.
I use it to keep up with current and former work colleagues, friends, authors of interest, and people with shared passions. Normally your advice is pretty good, but in the case of Twitter I think you really did this tool a disservice by not digging a bit deeper and maybe talking to some people who really use it.
Dee-Ann LeBlanc
Garibaldi Highlands
