Interesting: Twitter

March 11th, 2007

Twitter.

Twitter is strangely compelling. While many wonder what the point is and whether it’s jumping the shark, I’m still intrigued enough to keep messing with it. I think I’ve found my use for it, in conjunction with this blog, for personal stuff too trivial to warrant a full post. In addition, I’ll go out on a limb and say Twitter has huge mainstream possibilities, because it’s way easier than blogging.

Twitter seems to fill a small space between IM, MyBlogLog, email, and blogs. The biggest difference from IM is that it’s asynchronous – not time sensitive. Meaning, a message stays up until it’s replaced by a new one. It’s also not directed towards one user – it goes out to all your “friends” or “followers.” This is where the social networking aspect comes in, as you collect contacts, reminding me of MyBlogLog. There isn’t a specific Twitter client (although I found this one for the Mac, Twitterific). You can twitter from the web, a cell phone, or IM client. It’s basically like texting from anywhere to everybody. Twitter suggests one should “tweet” about what they’re currently doing with their so-called-lives, but it could be filled with anything textual.

So how will I use Twitter? I think Twitter-space will be perfect for little personal info-nuggets, totally trivial stuff that I want to toss out there, but too short for a full post, and I have no interest in its posterity.

Twitter may fill my desire to get more personal but not clutter up the primary content of this blog. Generally speaking, I’ve avoided talking in great detail about my personal life in blog posts for a few reasons:

I don’t want personal details about my daily activities splattered all over the Internet.
My life is relatively dull. Much of my day-to-day activities aren’t worth writing an entire paragraph about, let alone a blog entry.

So in my blog sidebar, I’ve added a section for Twitter. It being in the sidebar and changing often means it has less chance of being picked up by search engines as a stand alone article.

In conclusion, I think Twitter has huge mainstream appeal (as Mathew Ingram notes, it’s similar to how teenagers use IM). It takes serious effort to write an entire paragraph for a decent blog post, while it takes practically none to twitter a sentence every once in a while. It fills that last space of narcissism, where anybody who’s alive can participate. If you can answer the most common question asked over a friendly phone call: “So what’s new with you?” you can Twitter.

What’s strange is in Twitter space, a single line of text with the most mundane crap like: “I went to the dentist and read People magazine” has a haiku-like significance. Plus, “twitter” works as a verb.

So please check out my Twitter page, see Robert Scoble’s in action, and if you’re a regular reader, check out the service yourself. Consider signing up so I’ll have more people to Twitter to.

Note: Here’s a great page with Twitter resources (hat tip Steve Rubel).Â

Additional Reading: Paris Lemon, Joe Duck, Mark Evans, Neville Hobson

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