There's a couple ways of thinking about Twitter. One is that it's a waste of time, a bunch of people writing about what they ate for breakfast. Yes, there's some of that.

But you can also use the service to monitor news and network for jobs.

I use Twitter as a sort of link blog. As a filmmaker, I follow a lot of movie news and horror genre bloggers to get the latest headlines. Here are some recommended accounts worth following:

MOVIE NEWS
http://twitter.com/Variety
http://twitter.com/twitchfilm
http://twitter.com/slashfilm
http://twitter.com/cinematical
http://twitter.com/Chud_News_Feed
http://twitter.com/DrewAtHitFix
http://twitter.com/rejectnation

HORROR MOVIE NEWS
http://twitter.com/dreadcentral
http://twitter.com/BGhorror
http://twitter.com/BD_News
http://twitter.com/horrorsociety
http://twitter.com/FEARnet

FILMMAKING INFO
http://twitter.com/TriggerStreet
http://twitter.com/FansOfFilm
http://twitter.com/bcfilmmaker
http://twitter.com/scriptmag
http://twitter.com/ScreenplayTips
http://twitter.com/filmlab

FILM FESTIVAL LISTINGS
http://twitter.com/filmfestlounge
http://twitter.com/ominous_events
http://twitter.com/bsidenews

TIPS ON USING TWITTER AND FACEBOOK
http://twitter.com/mashable
http://twitter.com/twfeed
http://twitter.com/MrTweet

I also put out content on a number of blogs. How do I get that information in front of eyeballs? I post promotional links on Twitter... but that's not all. Not everyone is on Twitter, of course. It's growing, but it's nowhere near the size of the growing Facebook or the fading Myspace.

Ping.fm is a site that aims to make the dissemination of information easier. I can post something once to my Ping account and let them repost it to my Twitter, Facebook, and Myspace status updates.

Easy, right? Get ready for the black belt stuff.

With a Twitterfeed account, you can hook up your blog RSS feeds to automatically repost to Twitter... or even Ping. So now I write a new blog post, RSS sends the info to Twitterfeed, which Pings it to all three accounts. This is not for the amateur -- I've run into some glitches, but if you understand RSS, it's worth it.

(I'm not even going to get into how I hooked up Ping to AIM so I could post via chat in Gmail. Yeesh.)

(I'm also not going into detail about FriendFeed, mostly because I haven't quite figured it out yet. Some people love it as an alternative to Twitter.)

The point is, I'm putting things out there. Not all of it is going to interest everybody, but Twitter and status updates are for short thoughts, like headlines. It's a great way scan what others are writing, but also build a personal audience by feeding info about your own projects. An engaged audience can be a powerful resource for you down the road.

...Tweeting like a true Captain of the Internet at http://twitter.com/mikeboas