Social networking for engineers
Twitter
Twitter is something completely different. In fact, it is hard to describe what Twitter is. That's partly because it is many different things to many different people. For example, I often hear people say they don't use Twitter because they don't want to know what their friend Joe had for lunch. But I've been using Twitter almost two years and have never learned what anyone had for lunch there.
Thus rather than try to describe Twitter or its capabilities, I'll just tell you how I use it as an engineer. I currently "follow" 276 Twitter users. Just a handful of these are "friends," while a larger set are "acquaintances." When one of the users that I follow writes something (in the lingo, "tweets"), I see it in a timeline of recent posts. All of the posts are short text (maximum 140 characters). I usually check in on this timeline one or two times a day, at which point I scan them for interesting bits of information; except for sometimes following links to longer articles, this activity takes on the order of 15 minutes a day tops.
I DON'T follow users who tweet a lot—say more than ten times per day. And I DON'T follow users that tweet what they ate for lunch. In fact, I ONLY follow users that typically include a link in every tweet. That is, what they are doing is feeding me a headline of possible interest; if it is of interest and I have time, then I follow the link to read more.
The vast majority of the users I follow are in the embedded systems design community. Some are engineers. Some are marketers. Some sell tools that I use. Some are just in software or engineering more broadly. A few cover hobby interests of mine. The best tweeters always stay on topic, in their area of expertise—just as I try to do by posting from a narrower topic area than I read.
From reading these streams of tweets I stay vastly more up to date on the technologies and products of most interest to me than was ever possible before. I've basically stopped reading newspaper websites and some blogs and read twitter instead. (But just like printed newspapers, when you don't have time to keep up, the old stuff just drifts to the bottom of the stack where you may never get to it.)
You can view a timeline of my tweets at http://twitter.com/netrinomike. If you find the kinds of links I post there interesting, feel free to "follow" me. Unlike most other social networking services, you can follow anyone on Twitter just for knowing their handle.
Delicious
Delicious is an Internet bookmarking service that can be social if you want it to be. By bookmarking service, I mean that it's an alternative to the long list of bookmarks you've probably been keeping in your browser.
Rather, as I come across interesting web pages during Internet research, I save those I think I may want to come back to sometime later in delicious. There are a number of advantages of keeping bookmarks in this way:
- you can add notes to each bookmark
- you can categorize ("tag") each bookmark in as many ways as I want (e.g., "embedded" + "bloggers")
- you can search for a previous bookmark by keyword or tag
- your bookmarks are not tied to a specific browser on a specific computer
After using Delicious for more than five years, I now keep just 12 bookmarks in my web browser. These are links that I use daily or weekly. One of those is a shortcut to add the page I'm on to Delicious; another to my Delicious history.
Delicious can be social in that you can easily share links with friends and see what's popular across all users and things like that. I never use any of those features. (For one thing, what's popular on the whole site never includes the stuff about embedded software that I'm most passionate about.) Although I don't connect to other Delicious users much, I do make the majority of my bookmarks public—so you can browse or search them too.
You can see my public bookmarks at http://www.delicious.com/frappucino.
Have found a good use for these or other social networking services in your work as an engineer. If so, please drop me a line.
Michael Barr is the author of three books and over 50 articles about embedded systems design, as well as a former editor-in-chief of this magazine. Michael is also a popular speaker at the Embedded Systems Conference, a former adjunct professor at the University of Maryland, and the president of Netrino. He has assisted in the design and implementation of products ranging from safety-critical medical devices to satellite TV receivers. You can reach him via e-mail at mbarr@netrino.com or read more of what he has to say at his blog (www.embeddedgurus.net/barr-code).
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