Now Hear This!

ADI is on it. Digi-Key is on it. ISuppli is on it. And now EDN is on it.

As part of our ever-striving effort to keep the electronics industry informed, we’ve joined Twitter, www.twitter.com/EDNmagazine, the now famed social media tool that allows short "tweets" to be sent directly to associates, called followers.

I first checked out Twitter for EDN more than a year ago, and in early 2008 shrugged it off as a fly-by-night waste of time that did little more than share the mundane blips of life. For the record, I also wrote off e-mail as a means of communication in the early 1990s, online reporting in the late 1990s, and blogging in the early millennium, considering all of them hollow and insignificant at their respective popular birth times. As I've since built a career in online reporting and blogging, one that heavily relies on e-mail to spread information to the masses, I'm happy to look back and admit my erroneous thinking.  

But how good could something that has the word "twit" in it and was created by a guy named "Biz Stone" actually be, right? Wrong.

While we didn't run with Twitter at EDN immediately, I stuck with Twitter on the personal side and, as more people have validated it -- helping users like me weed out tweets from those who have nothing better to do than advertise they are going to get coffee to those sharing significant information, like the folks at iSuppli -- it has matured into an actual tool, not just another MySpace, I-have-600-friends-like, flavor-of-the-moment site.

To be true, Twitter is far from perfect. I've gotten the "fail whale" image more times than I care to count and the 140 character limit does pose a challenge. But don't write this tool off as a pre-teen sensation that will be over and done with faster than the next boy band. There's real value here in making connections, delivering information, and staying informed.

And that's what we'll be doing with www.twitter.com/EDNmagazine. Follow us and you'll get real-time news updates, technical analysis, and quick tweets on our blogs, editors, and opportunities, faster than you do with EDN's newsletters and RSS feeds. You'll still want these as well as our print magazine for the full industry picture, mind you, but it never hurts to have information readily at hand in this rapidly changing, fast-paced world in which we design, partner, and compete.

And here's my promise to you: Your time will not be wasted with insignificant blurbs. You will not be overrun with 50 tweets a day about every little thing going on in the EDN universe. You have better things to do -- we get that. Be assured that our Twitter messages will be held to the same high standards we here at EDN hold all of our editorial products to.

You may have noticed several of EDN's bloggers are already on Twitter, tweeting away with updates on what they are writing and doing in the industry. Check out what they are doing below.

If you are unfamiliar with Twitter and want to know more, visit this page and read this article about who's driving Twitter's rising traffic (you may be surprised). And if you're on Twitter, drop me a line. We'll connect.

As always, your comments are welcome below. Love that EDN is leveraging Twitter, hate the idea, voice your opinions in the "Post a comment" section a few lines down.

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