Does Twitter help you become a better developer or distract you?

Question

Since I joined Twitter, I found it very useful to keep my finger on the pulse of technology and wherever it happens.

I follow many of the best Microsoft developers and find it interesting to see their struggles, opinions and influences ...

• codinghorror / Jeff Atwood
• shanselman / Scott Hanselman
• Hacked / Phil Haak
• RickStrahl / Rick Strahl
• Royosherov / Roy Osherov

It can be argued that twitter is just a distraction, not an inspiration.

How do you find twitter as a tool for tech savvy? Is it useful or just a waste of time?

If you find this useful ... who in the ASP.NET arena would offer you the following?

Answer 1

This is definitely a distraction, but I find that fun entertainment here and there is good for me. I get more work in a shorter time, when my morale is high, and communication with the outside world helps with this. I follow my wife, our cat (yes, has twitter), several friends, several ColdFusion and Flex evangelists, MVP SQL Server, several comedic razor tweeters and other developers and friends.

Answer 2

Distraction, like crackoverflow;)

Answer 3

It depends on how you use it. This is no more or less distracting from reading RSS or stackoverflow. For example, if you use a diet for lunch, then this is good.

Answer 4

Distraction, I used for 1 week, than stopped. I understand that you need a “contact” in life, but you need to work someday. I need to ask a question, I go to the product forum or here to ask. If I need to contact someone I know, I use IM.

Answer 5

DISTRACTIONAL! We must use it to update the project and cannot but waste time on it.

Answer 6

This is a distraction ... especially since most tweets are not related to programming ... i.e. Hanselman ... but what is the purpose of Twitter! So be ashamed of me for being a follower!

Answer 7

I would have to say a distraction. I posted a few tweets about the problems that I had, but no one "saves the day." Perhaps my network is simply small.

Answer 8

I tried using twitter, but I honestly did not understand that this could be useful for ... So I stopped

Answer 9

I prefer to follow Redis, MySQL, mongoDB, memcache, Sphinx and other twitter. It is usually very important to keep track of new versions, fix bugs, etc. Twitter is one of the best ways to do this. Following specific people gives too much "waste of time" and unexplored information.