On twitter

My father just joined twitter. So, i was thinking, how could twitter be useful to my dad? The fist thing of course would be to get the right tools (tweet deck or similar), rather then trying to use twitter.com. Second is finding people in his field (programming and networking) who have useful and interesting things to say and following them.

Then, i was thinking what could he do past that? How could twitter become helpful to his department (IT) within his school? A few quick thoughts:

• set up @jbu_helpdesk for students to report problems, and to learn about issues (outages, maintenance, etc)
• set up @jbu_ideas for students to give ideas about how IT stuff could be improved or made more efffective.
• set up some always running searches to watch for jbu related comments. If somebody says “i hate it when the printers at jbu dont work” they can respond and figure out the problem.
• how about setting up @jbu_print and writing a program so that students could direct message an amount and a code and have that amount added to their printing account

just a few quick ideas