Employers A-Twittering?

I know class is almost over, but I came across this and couldn't pass up a post. Prof. Eisman has been urging us to try out Twitter (for the record, I tried it and am not sold). But Loren Heiny, a programmer and blogger at Incremental Blogger, published an interesting post today. We're all well aware that we are "Google-able" and that prospective employers will probably run our name through the search engine and pay careful attention to what it spits out. We're also very conscious as college students of what we put up on our FaceBook profiles. But Heiny warns that Twitter may be the next measurement for employers to keep tabs on their future employees.

He says, "Read through their tweets to see what they talk about. Is it all about drinking and partying or playing golf or some other leisure activity? Or is there talk about industry trends and news. The latter is more compelling. What’s the demeanor? Is it matter of fact? Confrontational?"

He also says that looking at the ratio of followers to who a Twitter user is following is telling, as well as how often they use Twitter: "How often does the person tweet? Once, ever? Once a day or so? Dozens of times a day? I’m not sure what the frequency of tweeting says, other than the person’s acceptance of the Twitter concept. A more important measure, might be how often other people respond to what the person says or asks."

Personally, I think that there are simply not enough young users on Twitter for this to become as standard as "Googleing" or "Facebooking" someone to find out about their life outside of their resume. I do, however, think that it is interesting to use a status message application to check up on someone; usually profiles posted on sites like MySpace or FaceBook are the standard way to look into a future employee. But think about it: how many of you would feel comfortable with your employer checking your AIM or Gchat away message regularly? Twitter is basically the same thing, only it keeps records of your previous away messages. So, if you have an "out partying" status message on Thursday night, your boss can see it on your Twitter and will know why you're so groggy on Friday morning.

If it is true that Twitter is on its way to becoming another way to check up on future employees, I think that this will further prevent younger users from jumping on the Twitter bandwagon.