Introduction to Twitter | One Academic's First Steps

I have just started using Twitter. This post documents my experience. My aim is to give some suggestions to others who might be considering the adoption of Twitter.
I read some introductory materials:

• Basic Introductions: A beginners guide; Twitter in plain English; NY Times
• More comprehensive overviews: My favourite is The Complete Guide to Twitter. Others include A wiki on Twitter; List of Free ebooks on Twitter;
• Using twitter as a complement to blog posting: Problogger
• Academic applications: Twitter tips for academics

I organised my Twitter setup

• I set up an account on Twitter: http://twitter.com/jeromyanglim
• I set up a referral from my blog to my twitter account on Twitterfeed.
• I found a few people to follow: I'd heard about the #rstats tag and recognised a few familiar faces from the R community and various blogs that I follow. I ran some searches using some keywords that interest me and found some more people with interesting tweets.
• I downloaded a Twitter dekstop client called Twhirl.
• Once I was following a few people, I used Twubble to get other suggestions. It works on the idea that you may want to follow people that are followed by multiple people that you follow.
• I installed a Twitter App for my iPhone (Twitterrific).
• FriendOrFollow tells you about who is reciprocating following.
• I added an option in Feedburner to add a Tweet button to my RSS feeds (introduction to retweeting; retweet button in blogs).
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Hashtags that interest me

• #rstats ; used to refer to R

Assorted ideas for using Twitter that interest me

• Subjects can have a dedicated Twitter hashtag and students can then use this to discuss the subject on Twitter.
• The main newspaper I read, The Age, has hashtags associated with many of its articles. This makes it possible to write a blog post, make a comment on Twitter that links the article's hashtag to my blog post, and thereby allow readers interested in the article to read my blog post. Here's an example.
• I am exploring the idea of having multiple accounts for different purposes.
• Getting answers and feedback on blog posts or anything else.
• Providing a record of journal articles that I'm reading and sharing key findings. In particular, Twitter can function as a simple recommendation system for increasing exposure to useful materials.