I must admit I have been a Twitter sceptic.

A service that lets you send ultrashort messages to a group of contacts? Come on!!!

There is enough information noise in my life already: email, phones, RSS feed and web sites to follow, meetings, text messages. The list goes on and on.

My wife convinced me, however, and I have now opened my own Twitter account.

Sure, there are enough of Facebook like messages: “I am taking my dog for a walk!”, “It is raining” etc. — the kind of bonding and grooming oriented chatter we humans are so good at.

But there are also highly useful messages announcing meetings, online articles, news items etc, and if you follow people having the same interests as yourself, you will get the latest news awfully fast.

I have so far used my Twitter account to broadcast information about search engines and innovation policy, and will probably also use it to tell people about other findings as well.

You will find me as perkoch over at Twitter.

I have also set up an automatic forwarding of messages every time we publish a new blogpost at Pandia (follow pandianews).

Finally, i believe I must be one of the first to make a Twitter-feed for a public institution in Norway. The research and innovation policy portal of the Research Council of Norway, Innovation Norway and SIVA now has its own twitter id called forinnportalen. If you can read “Scandinavian” and find R&D policies exciting, that one might be for you.

I spendt some time trying to find people working in my areas of interest. It helped a lot to have the Twitter subscription list for Pandia available. However, as soon as you have found one person sharing your interests, you can use their list of contacts for finding more.

Susanne (susanneanette at Twitter) has written a couple of articles over at Pandia that might interest twitterers:

MicroPlaza: Better search, trend watch and filters for Twitter (get invites!)
To twitter or not to twitter
5 fun things to do with Twitter
3 ways to search Twitter
What is Twitter authority search?