At some point many years ago, my former boss told me I needed a Twitter account for the CAT Facility. As someone who was happily living outside of the social media sphere, I was a bit annoyed at the prospect. But we did anyway, and used the tool  to announced our events and communications, sometimes commenting on posts about bad flow data. It never got awesome for me, and I count very few things that were significant for us – Flowreada.io and AutoSpill are probably the only noteworthy discoveries that I’ve made through Twitter. It otherwise has very few good uses for us – it does not reach our UoC users, and I’d actually be hard pressed to say who we’re talking to for that matter.

Things have got worse lately, and I find that the ratio of things of interest vs. junk is completely out of whack. Hanging on Twitter can take a toll on one’s mental wellness, so I just decided to ignore our account going forward.

There’s been some talk amongst core facility people on the use of social media to create a community of flow cytometry users. At this time, the Purdue Cytometry Mailing List remains the best way to keep in touch with the latest in the field in my opinion. It was called outdated on this very blog a decade ago, but it’s still the best there is out there… We had high hopes for social media, but its usefulness has been questionable. I think there is neat content coming on YouTube, and I’d guess this is where things are moving. On that note, you can follow our YouTube channel if you’re looking for training material and tutorials. Please leave comments and questions, I can get so lonely out there!

And then there is this blogpost – an outdated tool, but does the work very well! Subscribe to get the latest news! And leave a comment below, I’d love to see to which forum you think the discussion is moving?

Recent Posts