I’m new to Twitter. I resisted for a long time, but gave in recently and am actually very pleasantly surprised with how interested I am in the service, and probably more importantly, the paradigm.

Software developers (and I still count myself as one) tend to shun interruptions, for good reason:

The other trouble is that it’s so easy to get knocked out of the zone. Noise, phone calls, going out for lunch, having to drive 5 minutes to Starbucks for coffee, and interruptions by coworkers — ESPECIALLY interruptions by coworkers — all knock you out of the zone. If you take a 1 minute interruption by a coworker asking you a question, and this knocks out your concentration enough that it takes you half an hour to get productive again, your overall productivity is in serious trouble.

Developers also tend to be more introverted and socially isolated than your average bear.  Sometimes much more so; I’ve always been a tweener, able to talk to both technical and non-technical alike.  However, I’m no social butterfly by any means.  Yet strangely enough, I’ve really enjoyed my Twitter experience so far and can actually anticipate gains in inspiration offsetting any losses from getting out of the flow.

So far, I’ve experimented with:

• Twitter via the website
• Snitter
• Twhirl
• Flock

Of all of these, Flock appears the most broken. No way to post directly from the sidebar, bad line wrapping, no easy reply capability, no context-sensitive follow, etc. It’s another bummer about Flock, which I keep wanting to love, but which keeps falling just a bit short. Like I mentioned earlier, it would be great if they did a better job of publicizing their roadmap, and kept in better touch with the people who are raising issues. A lot of them would work with the Flock dev team to help suss out issues.

So I’m sticking with Twhirl for the time being, which is a nice-looking, feature-laden Adobe Air client for Windows.

Follow me at /anthonyrstevens