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I have to admit to a love-hate relationship with Twitter, the microblogging “what are you doing?” tool that many people are, shall we say, twittering about. Some days I love being tuned into all the goings on in my community there, other days, I just need to tune out.

140 characters, enough to say where you are during a conference and find out who wants to meet for dinner. Or to find out where there’s a great session going on so you can leave the deadly dull one that you ended up in by mistake. I’ve used it a lot during conferences and had great meetups with colleagues I would have missed otherwise.

On a day to day basis, it’s very useful for sharing breaking news, alerts about interesting blog posts, posing questions and getting fast answers. Many organizations are using it to connect with customers, patrons, supporters. Political campaigns use twitter to alert supporters to the latest campaign news. Libraries use it as one more way to distribute updates about services and events. Library professional groups use it to get news out to members and the library community at large.

What you get out of it, depends on finding friends and colleagues who share your interests. And like any community, you have to give to get. So I try to respond to questions when I can and share new resources that I come across. In return I’ve gotten help with questions of my own. Will I stay with Twitter forever? Will I be fickle and love it and leave it? I don’t know, it has had some problems keeping up with traffic lately. If they continues, people will certainly move on to another tool that serves the same purpose, and there are other ones out there! For now, I’m finding Twitter a useful way to connect with friends and colleagues.

To find out more and see some great examples of how libraries are using Twitter, read Elyssa Kroski’s terrific article in School Library Journal, All a Twitter: Want to Try Microblogging? It’s an excellent introduction to Twitter. And even if you don’t get into using Twitter yourself, it’s definitely a tool to be aware of.

Commoncraft does it again. Twitter in Plain English is a great explanation of why Twitter is so popular. What are YOU doing? 140 characters or less please.

While looking at some travel sites earlier today, I ran across an interesting airport chatter service at flightstats.com

Use this service to find out what’s happening now at your airport(s) and to share your observations with fellow travelers. Chatter topics include security wait times, traffic conditions, tips on airport services, incidents, ground transportation, customs/immigration experiences, check-in conditions and much more. Feel free to add to the chatter!

It’s a great idea, though it doesn’t seem to have enough people chattering at any one time for it to be tremendously useful. Perhaps it will improve over time. I hope so.

This got me thinking about how twitter might be used to accomplish something like this. Still haven’t found if there is a mashup of twitter and aiport chatter, but I did find this very nifty new service call CommuterFeed.

It’s a feed of twitter posts about traffic and transit delays throughout the world. You contribute to it by sending a twitter tweet to the user @commuter, followed by your airport code. So a delay on a Los Angeles highway would be go something like this “@commuter LAX delay on the 405 at the 105″. To receive updates on your location, you can pick up an RSS feed for your region.

Pretty nifty.