Why I use Twitter

Actually, I don't twitter much, mostly I follow twitters. I use twitter as way to find new information and discover intersections.  Twitter succeeds where RSS feeds fail and leave me cold, which is to say that Twitter can provide vetted information from people with similarly aligned interests.

Today's example is from @zoecello.  I follow her because I love her music, she presents an interesting intersection between information technology and music and last but not least, she's left IT to be a professional musician, which is something I aspire to one day.   This tweet is exemplary of the type of serendipity that I find using twitter:

@zoecello: Today's task: make a demo piece of music for Robert Hodgin (http://www.flight404.com) to work with

The name and the website sounded faintly familiar, so I followed the link to flight404.   The site is the blog of Robert Hodgin who is doing very cool visualization stuff with Processing.  Even better was a nugget about Processing code to read and render SRTM .hgt elevation files.  This site is the portfolio of Kyle McDonald who also had some neat structured light examples.  I really haven't had this type of productive linkage in quite a while.