The thing many people hate about twitter is the noise.  If you are just there to socialize, it may not be a big deal but twitter can be pretty useful for more serious things too.  If you want to get information about cars or software or politics its there but likely burried in a bunch of useless information.

One way to filter out the “junk” is to use one of the twitter seach tools.  Tweetdeck has one built in.  You can go to search.twitter.com for others. Its useful in the way a search engine is useful but it doesn’t always help for getting the whole conversation in real time.

Another options is to try to follow tags. I was at a conference lately where we used #PLMCONX for our tweets. This helps but I had trouble remembering to use the tag. And then there were gray areas… do I tweet that I’m getting lunch at the confererence or stick to the topic?

The traditional way is to follow the person in twitter. If they don’t talk about what you like, don’t follow them.  I’ve got a good list of CAD, industrial design, car, virtual world, sports, Huntsville, and social media experts that I follow.  You see the problem here, right?  When I reply back to one of the people in these groups, all I do is increase the noise for the rest.

So, for the people that follow me, I’m sorry I’m inserting all that noise into your twitter stream. Now, to go tell everyone I’m getting some coffee.

I just got word from @dananLewis that the next Huntsville tweetup will be March 19 at Angel Island Coffee at 6pm.  You can track any discussion about it using the #HSVTweetup tag.

If you have not been to a tweetup before, this is a good place to start.  Angels has free Wifi and good coffee, tea and other drinks.  You can see what happened at that last Angel’s tweetup here.

Heres a link and a map to find them:

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Anyone that follows me on twitter likely knows I’m a big coffee drinker.  I couldn’t wait until they started building Starbucks in my little corner of Alabama.  I used to have a credit card that gave money back for my kids education until Starbucks came up with the Duetto card that gave money for coffee (they say you start ignoring your family when you get addicted ).  I also visit most of the coffee houses in my area. Will this change?   Maybe.  More on that later.

The picture above is of my newest toy, a Tassimo coffee maker from Bosch. You will see a rack in the back of cartridges, mostly coffee but also tea, hot chocolate, and milk. It creates a single cup of coffee from one of these cartridges in about 60 seconds.

Each disk has a bar code that says what temperature, amount of water, and flow rate should be used for the coffee, expresso or other drink.  For the engineers and tech geeks like me, check out Hacking the Tassimo Part 1 and Part 2 for the details of the bar codes.

Here is what I’m so keen on this thing (other than it being a cool gadget):

1. It makes REALLY good coffee. It surprised me how good.
2. It is a single cup.  My house is high traffic with 3 older kids. Five of us plus friends and we all like different types of coffeee (plus, my daughter likes hot chocolate and my wife likes tea)
3. No mess. Sometimes you have to wipe it down because of a coffee splash but still much easier than a regular coffee pot.
4. There are many different coffee options.  The Starbucks tastes a lot like what I get at Starbucks.

The one thing I don’t like about Starbucks is the difficulty of using the Wifi. I overlook it for the coffee and ambience.   The way it works is this… you get a starbucks card, register it, and use it once a month. Then you get a login to the ATT Wifi. Sounds good but it isn’t.  You see I use my Duetto card which I can’t use with the Wifi.  So I have to get ANOTHER Starbucks card and buy a little bit with one card and a little bit with the other… crazy. Plus, I usually visit with others like family or friends for work and if they don’t have a card or ATT wifi, its a pain.

Now, with Tassimo, I don’t really need to go for the coffee (Starbucks, I’m still glad I can get Starbucks for my Tassimo).  The other coffee houses have free no-hassle wifi so if you do something like a tweetup, it is easier to go someplace else. Now, the economy sucks.  

Local Starbucks, I hope you have a plan.  At the very least, start selling Tassimo disks.