Using twitter to stay up to date as a developer

Having listening to hanselminutes podcasts and a few other ones as well as discussions with others I felt the need to ask people out here – how do you keep up to date?

I speak with a good friend of mine who is a social carer and she is always talking about how hard it is to keep up to date and how often things change and how she goes about keeping up to date with these changes – as developers I’m sure we can all relate to that in some way.

How I keep up to date
In order to at least try to stay up to date I read blog posts and carefully select who I follow on twitter. For me the easiest way to stay up to date is to actually harness twitter in a way that allows me to follow the people who tweet about content I want to learn about, of course they also tweet other stuff which is also good but I use twitter as a learning tool, if people stop tweeting useful content then I will unfollow them as I like to have a useful twitter stream as a posed to tweets about running times and how they became the major of some place I’ve never heard of 😉

People ask me a lot why am I always on twitter – the real answer is I keep my ear to the ground and I like to learn whats
new out there or what people find useful.

Yeah blog posts are an invaluable tool but I have spent less time recently reading my rss feeds and more time reading what people are tweeting about – I like to try to encourage people to tweet about useful stuff they come across on a day-to-day basis and is a reason I started my what I learned last week blog post series.

So my question to you guys out there is how do you go about keeping up to date, so you use twitter like me or not really? has it made you think about what you tweet or you dont care who reads what you tweet? discuss…