Even just thinking that sentence through as I type it, I wonder if I might tweet it, and subconsciously estimate the character count. (54 if you include the full stop, which I may not)

I think of my best tweets when I’m running.

Well, they always seem good at the time. Some even feel profound, insightful, useful, helpful.

When I get home, they’ve vanished.

Thoughts in 140 characters or fewer, processed and filed away somewhere in my prefrontal cortex.

It used to bother me that I couldn’t remember them, but now I accept it’s just part of my internal discourse, described so insighfully by Haruki Murakami in his excellent book What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, (which I thoroughly recommend to anyone who runs).

A few weeks ago I had coffee with Matthew Solle, who recorded and summarised our conversation as part of a series he’s putting together on his website. Thankfully Matthew captured some of the things I feel quite passionately about in writing, including my inability to write some of my thoughts down.

Sometimes people kindly offer me advice, such as using my phone’s voice recording facility. I definitely plan to give it a go. I fear I may become too self-conscious and aware of the device to verbalise the thoughts as naturally as when in conversation. And if I commit some of my thoughts to writing, perhaps I might somehow kill them off.

But I also wonder whether sometimes what matters more to me is the thought process itself. To borrow that well-worn cliché, the journey is the destination.

As @dulwichmum says, its nearest equivalent that people are familiar with is Facebook status updates.

Twitter updates, or “tweets” as they are sometimes called, are limited in length to 140 characters.

Apart from that, there are no rules about how to use Twitter.

Some people use it to share ideas, thoughts and links or to ask questions.

You can choose whether to make your updates public or private.

If you think someone is saying something interesting you can “follow” them, which subscribes you to their updates, which will appear on your Twitter homepage.

You can see who other people are following and who’s following them.

Well known people on Twitter include Stephen Fry, Imogen Heap, Andy Murray, Barack Obama (very quiet since he won the election).

Companies use Twitter to send out updates about their products and services and answer customers’ questions.

Even Tower Bridge has an account on Twitter, which sends out a tweet whenever the bridge is opening or closing.

There is a growing number of Twitter tools available to write, read and manage your updates, including apps for the iPhone.

One of the first and still one of the best applications I’ve seen is Twittervision – which overlays tweets from Twitter on a google map of the world, so you get to see where people are when they tweet something.

In the first show we’ll be interviewing David Sacks, CEO of microblogging service Yammer, winner of the TechCrunch50 award last month.

Yammer is designed to provide a secure online space where company employees (with the same company domain in their email address) can broadcast short messages to each other.

For example, people can use it to ask questions or to let everyone else know what they’re working on.

Yammer follows in the footsteps of the hugely successful Twitter, which is being put to great public effect in the run-up to the US presidential election.

Philosophically, Yammer – “What are you working on?” within the company – and Twitter – “What are you doing?” publicly or privately – come from different places.

I’ve spoken with some companies who’ve been using Twitter to communicate in teams and groups privately for some time now. They say they can’t see the value in moving to Yammer. Others have said they find Yammer is just what they needed, and is really helping to make the feel part of the company.

Web-based services like these, along with many others, are described as the intranet beyond the firewall.

So I was just wondering…

1. With employees using more and more web-based services to get their work done and communicate, what now for internal communications and IT managers?
2. Why should we trust third-party services with our information?
3. What would happen if the service your company uses becomes a victim of the credit crunch?
4. What are the best and worst examples of people using microblogging services at work?
5. Do services like Yammer and Twitter finally spell the end of the company firewall as we know it?
6. Is all this the responsibility of the intranet manager? And if not, who’s responsibility is it?

As well as tracking East Dulwich, I’ve been tracking a few others including “intranet”

It makes for some pretty interesting reading but was hard to share online until I came across Tweet Scan courtesy of David Sterry the other day.

It’s a twitter search tool with an RSS feed of your search results…

You can filter your search to individual people on Twitter or have it search the entire public timeline.

Also you can add the search to your browser’s dropdown list of search engines.

That’s mighty handy.

And through it I’ve found blogs by Anu Gupta and Jeremiah Owyang, which I’ve added to my intranet reading list.

I wonder if this means people are actually having to talk to each other.

In very short sentences.

Previous articles covered Google Alerts and Technorati Watchlists.

This article is about Twitter and its tracking feature, using East Dulwich as the example subject.

Twitter

Twitter lets you share your thoughts with the world.

You can do this by text message (SMS), IM (instant messaging), via the Twitter website, or using a downloadable desktop application like Twitterific (Mac only).

Once you’ve set up your Twitter account you can start “tweeting” your updates. Sometimes called micro-blogging, it’s a bit like writing status updates in Facebook.

Your tweets will appear on your page on the Twitter website. My page is at http://www.twitter.com/beatnic and is public.

People who want to subscribe to your updates can become your “followers” – don’t worry it’s not as cultish as it sounds.

Your updates will appear on the Twitter public timeline. If you’d prefer not to be so public you can “protect” your updates – in this case people will need to request your permission to follow you.

If you’ve set yourself up with an RSS reader, you can add Twitter update feeds of the people you’re following.

People are using Twitter in all sorts of ways, including:

• The BBC tweets news headlines and links to the full articles on its website
• US presidential candidate Barrack Obama tweets about his campaign
• Transport for London tweets traffic updates (using a service called twitterfeed to convert RSS items to tweets.

Twittervision is a mesmerising website showing what people are tweeting right now, and where they are in the world. It’s a mash-up of Twitter – using a feed from the public timeline – and Google maps.

Tracking subjects on Twitter

One of the features of Twitter is the ability to “track” subjects.

You can do this using by text message (SMS) and IM. At the moment, this is limited to text message (SMS) only. [thanks to Andrew M for the correction - see comments]

Text or instant message Track East Dulwich to Twitter. You will immediately recieve a confirmation message.

That’s it. You’ll now receive updates for any public Twitter update mentioning the subject/s your tracking.

If you’re logged in to IM your updates will be by instant message only. Your text message updates from Twitter will be switched off until you log out of IM.

To stop tracking a subject, send a text or instant message with the words Untrack East Dulwich. Again, Twitter will send you an immediate confirmation message.

The rate of updates will very much depend on the subject you choose and the timing.

I’ve received one update for East Dulwich in the last three days.

Last night I tracked England and Croatia and received about 300 texts!

Cost of using Twitter with SMS in the UK

Sending a text to Twitter costs your mobile phone company’s standard text-message rate – watch out if you’re with 3 or T-mobile, according to this article on TechCrunch uk:

Note also that the 07624 in Twitter’s number (+44 762 4801423) means it is actually billed as “international” by 3 and T-Mobile, making it a pricey service for those who like to tweet via SMS.

Receiving text updates from Twitter is free in the UK. In the United States you pay.

The same Techcrunch article suggests a newly added a UK limit of 250 incoming texts per week.