After the LinkedIn and Facebook phenomena, here comes Twitter. When the short process of account creation is done, you can start writing small “posts” of maximum 140 characters. Twitter is a kind of micro-blogging platform. It is somehow between the blog and the chat. You can discuss a topic, and people can answer to your tweets. If you like someone’s topics, you can follow him. You will then discover all the people he follows and the ones following him. You can of course then connect with all these people.
At this stage you may ask yourself two questions. First question: why would you use Twitter? From a professional point of view, you can build a network of people in your field. You will also be aware of what happens in a particular domain. This is much more dynamic than a forum and it spreads faster than a newsletter.
Second question: what can you write in less than 140 characters? You can share an interesting article, highlight a website, point to a blog post, mention a nice book you have just read, some news you want to discuss about and many other things. In fact I use Twitter when I want to share something that would not deserve a whole post on my blog.
If you want to give Twitter a try, here is a list of data miners on Twitter. I have also mentioned their blog or company when available:
- analyticbridge (AnalyticBridge)
- anand_raj (Datawocky)
- BeyeNETWORK (Beye Network)
- DatabaseJournal (The Database Journal)
- DataMiningBlog (Data Mining Research)
- DeanAbbott (Abbott Analytics)
- decisionstats (Decision Stats)
- EnterpriseData (The Enterprise Data World Conference)
- Hey_jamie (Jamie’s Junk)
- IntelligentEnt (IntelligentEnterprise.com)
- kdnuggets (KDnuggets)
- matthewhurst (Data Mining: Text Mining, Visualization and Social Media)
- minethatdata (MineThatData)
- Neuralmarket (Neural Market Trends)
- peteskomoroch (Data Wrangling)
- SmartDataCo (Smart Data Collective Network)
- Teradata (TeraData)
- tdwi (The Data Warehousing Institute)
- TimManns (A blog by Tim Manns)
Also, don’t forget that you can see the following and followers of everyone. Here is a nice blog for more tips on Twitter. If you are a data miner and if you use Twitter, feel free to add a comment to this post and mention your user name.
