John Battelle’s blog post - Twitter. Oh God. echoes sentiments by a lot of folks in the C Suite. It’s true that a lot of the tweets are nonsense, what I’m eating, what I’m watching on TV, etc that might be interesting to your friends but are less welcome to others.

However the power of Twitter and social media in general shouldn’t be discounted. Take this story for one example:

Twitter Post Rescues Jailed Journalist in Egypt

James Karl Buck was bailed out of jail by a ‘tweet’ post on Twitter, a social networking site. The message “arr ested” was seen by Buck’s friends and bloggers in Egypt and the United States via the Internet.

Buck, a journalism graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley, was in Egypt for a school research project, ironically focused on bloggers and journalists who use tools like Twitter to keep in step with news, when Egyptian authorities arrested him. The authorities claimed that Buck may have been inciting a riot; although, Buck was merely photographing a labor rally near a textile mill in Mahalla, Egypt.

Buck reached Twitter through his cell phone, allowing him to make the post without being detected by authorities. Twitter allows its users to post 140 character or less messages, providing a place on the Web for people to be constantly updated in brief, to- the-point blogposts.

Thanks to the ‘tweet’ relaying his arrest, Buck was able to reach his friends via the Web, who contacted the U.S. Embassy and UC Berkeley, eventually sending a lawyer to bail him out of jail.

Buck says keeping in contact with the rest of the world via the Web and his Twitter posts kept him sane, curbed the fear that he would, “fall into a black whole” and potentially saved his life. Buck said that he “came to realize how important a tool like Twitter is.”

We all have overcrowded lives however Twitter is a pretty amazing resource. Choose who you follow carefully, weed out those who don’t tweet items of interest and watch your followers grow based on what you post.

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