After about two months, I finally finished reading Twitterville by Shel Israel (@shelisrael). One of my followers (@drio) asked for a review of the book, so here is my attempt to do so.

But first, a quick summary: Twitterville is a book that focuses on the dynamics of Twitter. It starts by explaining how Twitter works, but that is only a tiny introductory part of the book. The majority of the contents explain how people and business interact with each other by means of Twitter, and it does so by providing lots of real-life stories. The stories range from topics as diverse as businesses offering deals, to individuals raising funds for specific causes.

The book is easy to read and is well structured, and as you read through it you will realize that the author had to do some major research efforts to collect all the stories that he presents. I personally enjoyed the first half of the book a lot, but at some point I ran out of time for reading and my interest dropped. It was hard to pick on reading again because the book becomes quite repetitive after a few chapters; just keep in mind that it is a collection of personal experiences organized by different major topics and you won't be disappointed.

Twitterville has changed my view on Twitter. I have discovered many "use cases" for Twitter that I could not imagine and, as many people do, I used to disregard Twitter as a useless "status updates" system. Today, however, I have set up several Twitter searches to monitor some topics of my interest and I engage with people that I did not know beforehand. It kinda feels like a world-wide unorganized chat room to me... but, as the author mentions many times, the way you see and use Twitter is up to you and you alone!