I first started using Twitter in December of 2006. I was sitting in a hotel in Beverly Hills with not much better to do and I signed up for Yet Another Social Network that I had heard about. And I tweeted. Once. I then abandoned the service for several months.

This is a pattern I have seen many times - people sign up for Twitter, don’t get it, and then drop off for a while. But then something happened. My friends joined Twitter and it became a place where, after moving our separate ways, we could still communicate on a daily basis. My Twitter usage steadily increased.

I was really enjoying being able to keep up with my friends and their daily activities, mainly because I’m terrible at keeping in touch with people. But this was an easy, effortless and fun way to do so. And then something else happened. Twitter announced tracking, a way to get notices if a certain word or phrase is used on Twitter. It’s pretty easy if you have IM or SMS setup, you just send Twitter a message that says “track word”. The first thing I started tracking was “Seattle” in order to see if any other people using Twitter were in Seattle. One of the first tracks I got back was from somebody named @MarinaMartin tweeting that she was coming to Seattle.

I checked out this Marina character’s blog where she seemed like a pretty cool person and after tweeting back and forth, we found that we had quite a bit in common. I offered to buy her a Guinness when she came to town and the rest, as they say, is history. Perhaps I can illustrate with a graph.

This is what I like to call the “Marina Effect”. The point at which your usage of Twitter dramatically increases, usually due to newfound common bond with another person on Twitter. I slowly started following other people on Twitter that seemed interesting to me via many of the methods mentioned here. Although I was sad to see my small community disappear, the amount of interesting people on Twitter has kept me tweeting like crazy since then.

It’s now a place where I can share my day to those who care. I can tweet about cool links I find and commiserate with others if need be, or even share in good news. Twitter is always on and a place where I can toss my thoughts into the ether of the Internet and those that may be interested can snap them up and converse with me. I have used tracking to find new people in Seattle and even here in Germany, where I am currently on an extended contract.

Twitter, for me, has thus far been an online social network that has transcended into my real life and increased my quality of life. I’ve met people from all along my various walks of life and it’s fun to interact with them. Perhaps it’s the lack of a filter or the public nature of the site, but something allows Twitter to be a friendly place to accomplish all sorts of things. If you’re curious where I got the graphs above, keep an eye out for my next post about TweetStats.