At #scio12 (ScienceOnline 2012 for the non-twitter savvy) I learned really quickly that Twitter was going to be crucial. Luckily I had a scientific twitter account (@thescienceofant) that I used primarily to push my notebook entries to the web. I occasionally used the account to communicate with people as well, but I tended to stick to email for that purpose.

At scio12, as soon as I got off the plane I realized that people were organizing airport carpools, hotel meetups, dinner plans, etc and I knew right then that I would have to embrace the social site.

I’ve been long of the opinion that twitter is useless. You get 160 characters to say what’s on your mind. Texting has evolved since Twitter started and 160 characters is only the limit if you are chatting with someone from 2006 (or has a phone from then), otherwise you can say what you want. How on earth can anyone say anything important in 160 characters?

The majority of the time they wouldn’t. Hence the revolution of the ham sandwich. By this I mean, people would just tweet meaningless things (like “I just ate a ham sandwich for lunch!”). Then I found the use of hashtags (the #thing feature) to be very silly. How would you know what to search for if you can make up your own tags? These things turned me off to twitter very fast.

But then I realized that my notebook posts would be retweeted and I was receiving regulars because of Twitter. Maybe this isn’t so useless after all!

And then I went to ScienceOnline where the organized hashtag (#scio12) made it very easy to follow what others were doing at the unconference. I could find friends, get in contact quickly with new friends, follow other sessions, share what’s going on in sessions I’m attending, check out new blogs/posts and share my own thoughts on the experience.

Now I know that Twitter has a place in the digital science revolution and even more so can greatly impact open notebook science and open science in general. If everyone is already on Twitter, then sharing new tools for ONS/OS would be very helpful to those who don’t know the tools exist. Plus the system is already built around communication, so meeting new people and interacting with them is pretty easy. And I can see how it could be used for citizen science projects (but can’t think of any examples or reasons right now).

Now the big thing for me is giving back to the Twitter community like it has been giving to me. Once that level is reached, I expect my interaction with Tweeps (as they are referred to) to explode. Slowly, slowly…