I’m a late adapter of twitter; well I guess a late user would be more accurate. I signed up for it a while ago but just never really got into it. This past month though I thought, what the hell, let me make a concerted effort to use it and I will see if I like it then. I’m all about making an informed decision!
This month has been going good; I’ve been able to keep up with what “friends” are doing, as well as keep them up to date with me. It’s also not a bad way to publicize something or get help. But as with anything, you get out of it what you put in, so if you sign up simply to post links to your blog posts, it’s not going to work for you.
Last night I was doing some travel planning and my travel site for the last year and a half has been Kayak.Com. The site in general is really awesome as it’s easy to use and the results are the best I have found (and I am a major comprison shopper); you can read more in a post that I wrote last year.
Last night I was having issues with the site though. I found a hotel I wanted to stay at and went to book it and I kept getting an error message. This happened no matter what hotel I tried to book. So I was on twitter and I wrote:
kayak.com isn’t working right for me
Within about 2 minutes I get an email from twitter telling me some guy named agentbillo is now following me. I always investigate the people who follow me to see if I should follow them as well. Well, his bio said: chief architect @ kayak . It was like my fairy godmother had come down and presented agentbillo right to me!
About a minute later I follow him and get a message saying:
saw you were having trouble with kayak.com? can I help? (I work for kayak)
I mean, seriously, how cool is that? I just made a simple statement that I was having trouble with the site and within minutes appears the chief architect of the site appears wanting to help me. And kudos to Kayak.com and agentbillo for their excellent customer service support. To say I was impressed, would be an understatement. I’ve been a loyal Kayak.com user for quite some time and will continue to be, but now I hope you guys check them out too!
This whole occurence happened though because of twitter tracking. Twitter tracking basically lets you track certain words or phrases. If I want to track the words, “Sara is Cool”, for example, in my phone or IM I type in track sara is cool
and any time someone says that phrase, i will get notified! The twitter tracking isn’t released in their API but as soon as it is, I want to make a plugin for it!
Do any of you use twitter? Tell me your username and I will follow you. I am ses5909
Again, many thanks to agentbillo! He’s got a pretty good geek blog himself at egopoly!