Software

I can relate to the sequence of events well.

As a current Ed Techie and EFL instructor, I saw the hype emerging and didn't pay much heed to it. It was only when a colleague introduced it to me that I began to wonder more about it so I signed up for an account which (predictably) stayed largely dormant for a few months. I only began to see some credence in using it about 8 months ago for staying connected with my Ed Techie colleagues (small department - six employees) who are spread apart by both a 150 km gap between two campuses and then again, within each campus. We experimented with using it for a "closed" message system and it worked fine. Exchanges became less formal over time. It was also easily adaptible and customizable in how we wanted to have such exchanges fielded (i.e. via iPhone, Tweetfalls or Twitterfox - in my case). As the immediacy of the connectivity became better appreciated, each one of us also began trying things to see what could and could not be done with it. The biggest find - the ability to send abbreviated URLs combined with screen capture tools (i.e. Jing) thus promoting some real time tech support for each other and eventually the colleagues we sought to help.

Affordances that I have come to appreciate?
Easy to set up and use.
- takes very little time to set up an account

Flexible in how it can be set up and used.
- with a little bit more knowledge, it can be set up to realize an entirely "closed" system or adapted to support more than one account (personal and business)

Facilitated "connectivity"
- building a better understanding of what I and others are up to
- building my own "professional development" network .. to not just s
Out of our exchange of resources, questions and answers came the beginnings of an online "community of practice" which we hadn't really realized before.

Notes are archived
- becomes an on the fly repository of questions and answers

There's likely more but these are the first to spring to mind.