Are you tweeting on the job? Aliza Sherman takes on the issue of whether Twitter is a time waster or a productivity tool. Is it an indispensable and efficient part of daily communications or a silly distraction? That might depend on how and why you use it. Aliza outlines both ten positives and ten negatives, offering links to several useful applications.

For more on maximizing the utility, Kim Lau a has great post on getting things done with Twitter, commenting that "There’s a lot you didn’t know you could do with 140 character spurts." She's compiled a list of applications that extend Twitter's capabilities - tools that allow you to track expenses, organize travel, monitor your commute, or keep post it note reminders. One that we found particularly useful for work projects is called GroupTweet, a group message broadcasting tool that offers a quick way for team members to broadcast quick, private messages.

Here are a few other useful Twitter tools:
Twibs - browse 4,755 current twitter businesses on twibs.com
Twitter Groups helps you to find groups of interest
Guide to Twitter for Business
14 tools of highly effective Twitter users
Twitter in Plain English (video)
Twitter - a beginner's Guide

Caution - a tool is only as good as its user
Before you harness an unfamiliar social web tool for business purposes, you might want to play around with it for a bit and test it out with friends and family until you develop some familiarity with its capabilities. Even an "old school tool" like e-mail can have its pitfalls. Making the buzz all over the blogs for the last day or two is the embarrassing mistake that Twitter's HR manager recently made when she issued a rejection letter to 186 candidates, mistakenly hitting "to" rather than "BCC," thus exposing the identity of all the rejected candidates - oops. Kris Dunn at HR Capitalist offers the full scoop on this incident, a painful example of how technology tools can turn on you.