Another good Twitter episode

I had another atypical Twitter episode today and it was a good one. The media may be all anti-Twitter as just another fad they don’t understand, and I may use Twitter as an almost-chat tool with friends, but every now and then something useful comes out of Twitter. Good help.

Last week, CAVEcrewer Jared mentioned the web service Drop.io to me as a way to easily send large files to people. I thought it was just that, nothing more than a on-the-fly big file hosting, but as I started to dig deeper in to Drop.io, I discovered it’s a very rich tool. Drop.io has a public API that has been really well built and gives you control over many of Drop.io’s functions, essentially letting you build your own apps on top of Drop.io. And while I can build many of my own web apps and services, there’s nothing better than cobbling together what are basically free services to create a new service. The power of free and open.

I played with the API for a couple days and kept getting hung up on a problem. The docs for the API were clear, sorta, but not clear enough for me with my limited experience with RESTful interaction layers. I then vented my frustation on Twitter as a general tweet, not addressed to anyone imparticular. But then a few minutes later I got a reply from a non-followee soliciting help about the Drop.io API. It turned out to be one of the guys that helped build the Drop.io API, Jake Good. Whatdayaknow!

I mailed Jake with my problem and he replied back with a solution that helped me continue with my development. All in all, over a short 15 minute period I got first-hand help from the folks at Drop.io about their product. I’ve heard of people Twittering about products (like Dell and cable companies) and getting reply tweets from customer service reps, which is wonderful, but how often to you end up in contact with someone of significance within that company? I mean, if you tweeted something about Apple, does Steve Jobs reply back out of nowhere?

OK, so that comparison is a little unfair, but you get the point. And the other point is that Twitter can help. Sure, people tweet about lots of stupid stuff; Kids pooping, long lines for Soup Nazi, and morning coffees, but amongst all the pointless stuff you will find very useful information. The catch is that if you’re not using Twitter for the more meaningless events, you won’t be in the habit of using it for important events that may yield great help and valuable contacts.

And hey, who’s Twitter hurting anyway? That’s right. Nobody.