I’ve been making a more conscious effort to participate on Twitter lately – I often come across some interesting links worth following, and frankly I enjoy the challenge of expressing myself within the 140-character limit. But, something is missing from Twitter – something that would make my experience a lot more convenient, enjoyable and valuable.

Twitter needs a “Like” button.

And here are four instances where I’d use it:

1. Someone says something really clever, or “right on,“ but it’s several hours before I see it. I want them to know I liked their thought, but I don’t want to compose a whole tweet referencing “that thing you said 14 hours ago.” (Because that phrase in itself takes up 32 of my 140 characters!)

2. And even if I see it right away, I might want to acknowledge that I saw it without a re-tweet (RT) and without remarking on it.

3. Someone replies to one of my tweets, but it’s several hours before I see it. I just want to acknowledge the fact that they spoke back to me, without rehashing the point.

4. Someone posts a link and I want them to know I liked it, even though it’s not something (for whatever reason) I would RT to my own followers.

In all of the instances above, I just want to be able to acknowledge something someone tweeted without getting into a conversation about it and without making it a “favorite.” (Favoriting a tweet hardly EVER makes sense to me – except maybe when saving links.)

So how about it, Twitter – give us a LIKE button!

Anyone else using Pinterest? I LOVE IT!! Create your own virtual “bulletin boards” filled with photos of things you love (“pin” pictures of your “interests” to your boards = PINTEREST!) Follow friends who have their own boards, comment on things others have “pinned” … it’s a very nifty social/sharing site. (And, one thing I love about it: when I log in and load my personal page, I’m treated to a beautiful collage of photos that represent my ideal romantic home, thrifty treasures, travel scenes, and even bike-related chromey-bits!

You can visit the Pinterest website and sign up to get on the waiting list to create your beta account, or just email me and I can send you an invitation! (There are a couple of you I wanted to invite but I didn’t want to share your email addy without your permission.)

Now that the new social app Foursquare is available worldwide, I’ve been giving it a try here in Des Moines. With Foursquare, I “check in” by texting a message to the service when I arrive at various destinations and collect points for my check-ins. (Eventually I could be appointed Mayor of a place I visit often. This is the only reason I even tried Foursquare in the first place.)

The purpose of this app is to let my friends know where I am while I’m out gallavanting around, so they can join me for a drink or a meal, and learn more (through tips) about why I like the places I patronize.

The problem is, the people I’m acquainted with who are most likely to be reading my updates are not the people who are usually wondering on a Saturday night, “Where the heck is Janet? I MUST go where Janet is and hang out!” So, this may ultimately end up being one of those situations where I finally just admit I’m not the target market, and accept defeat.

Unless I can find some valuable alternate use for Foursquare – not altogether unlikely, given that I once dismissed Twitter with a “talk to the hand” flourish, only to find that later it had morphed into an incredibly valuable business and personal connectivity tool.

So here, with a hopeful eye on the future of Foursquare, are a few alternate uses for this latest bit of “I don’t get it.”

• If you’re a professional with clients, or have friends who own businesses, you can earn brownie points by listing them as venues and then checking in. (You’re welcome, @Sambetti’s! And yes, I meant it about the onion rings.)
• Easy way to fake a day of outside sales calls when you’re really laying on a chaise lounge at home with an umbrella drink in your hand. (Aside: Foursquare needs a plug-in that lets you schedule auto-checkins to really be useful in this situation.)
• Useful tool for savvy burglars who can estimate, based on your latest check-in, how much time they have to ransack your house.
• Quick way to notify loved ones that Captain Sulley has safely landed your plane (i.e., “Just checked in @Hudson River.”)
• What, too soon?

Before Twitter, the best you could hope for waiting for word on a family member undergoing surgery was a couple of updates from the surgical team. Now, assuming your loved one’s having surgery in a Twitter-savvy hospital, you can get a real-time play-by-play of the procedure.  An Associated Press report about a Cedar Rapids woman whose family followed her procedure via Twitter states that more than 300 tweets were sent over the course of the three-hour surgical procedure.

While I think this is a great use of Twitter – family members said it was better than “sitting and not knowing in the waiting room” – I do wonder what would’ve happened if something had gone wrong during the procedure. Would the surgical team keep tweeting? Or, in the interest of protecting the patient’s privacy, would they have come out to update the family in person?

Twitter’s potential as a real-time news feed has been well-documented, from the shootings at Virginia Tech to tracking California wildfires.  However, I think there is still the potential to become too focused on the technology and lose the human side of communication. I’d hope, that if I’m one day sitting in a surgical waiting room, I don’t find out my loved one has died by reading it on Twitter.

Interesting phenomenon that can only happen on Twitter. Bob Barker was a “trending topic” on Twitter today – meaning he was one of the most-often tweeted topics of the day – because he hosted a television program called WWE Raw. (The wisdom of that has yet to be determined.) Then later, he was STILL a trending topic because so many people thought he had died because they could see he had trended – so they’d log into Twitter and search for his name, only to learn that he wasn’t dead, he was just on television, and then they’d tweet about it. I’m now curious to see how long this will continue, and I’m naming this Twitter phenomenon “Barkering” – as in, “to Barker.”  If you Barker on Twitter, it means you trended, and so many people thought you died because you trended that they continued to tweet about you, which kept you trending in a continuous loop.