All a-Twitter

stumax — Sun, 11 Mar 2007 20:18:40 +0000

So, I’ve been spending some time over the last couple of days trying to grok Twitter, the new hybrid messaging service that everyone’s been glomming onto lately. I first signed up a few weeks ago, but as I was only occasionally dipping into the public stream of Twitters, I didn’t really get what the big deal was. Today, though, I started adding more friends, and now I have a different perspective on the whole thing.

I have 15 friends right now, and they range from people I know fairly well, to casual acquaintances, to people whose blogs I follow, to complete strangers like presidential candidate John Edwards. And I guess I’m wondering… well, then, what’s the purpose of Twitter? What’s it for?

Here are a few things I could see being useful:

keeping up with friends
letting friends keep up with me
keeping up with thought leaders and other smart folk in a way that’s more efficient and immediate than blogging (Yeah, blogging! How archaic!)
engaging in a kind of microblogging
engaging in a kind of creepy celebrity stalking

In truth, I think I’m doing a little of each of the above right now.

There are all kinds of complex and profound choices to be made in this seemingly simple service. Do I send updates to everyone, or just my “friends?” Do I add just anyone as my friend, or do I maintain some sort of selectivity? If I add someone as a friend and they don’t friend me back, should I take that personally? Do I friend someone just because they befriended me? If I friend someone, should I also friend their spouse? And what kind of Twitters do I twit about? Is Twitter a status updater or a conversation channel? How much I is TMI?

Obviously, I’m still trying to sort out my feelings about Twitter. There are some very cool things about the service. I like sending out simple updates, and then dipping into the whirlpools of conversation that people are having. It’s like walking through a mall and hearing snippets of people’s lives.

I also like that I can have a faux-intimate connection to someone like John Edwards. It’s thrilling to see the most mundane updates. “Interviews, airplanes, and just arrived in Houston.” “In san antonio.” “In Seattle.” Hey, that’s where I live! “Changing this country.” Rock on, Senator. All this somehow makes Edwards more real to me; it brings his campaign down to a human level. (Plus, he added me as a friend! How cool is that!?)

Maybe, actually, that’s the coolest thing about Twitter: most of our lives are filled with mundane events. There’s something very comforting and very human about the tiny little updates — not instead of, but rather as a supplement to longer blog posts or podcasts.

On the other hand, I’m only following 15 people right now, so the flow of Twitters is very manageable. Some Twitterpatrons have hundreds of friends and followers. At that level, isn’t this just another channel of noise? I mean, I’ve got over 300 RSS feeds, Skype, IM, IRC, and far more email than I can handle. Do I really need another simultaneous stream of bits to join the firehose?

Wait, I can answer that: No, I don’t. And yet I just added an IM client to my Treo so that I can keep up anytime anywhere. [Sigh]

Oh, well. Heaven help me, but I do love watching the landscape change. I am continually fascinated by how the internet warps and weaves, by how we invent and re-invent ways to connect with each other. Will Twitter be a passing fad or a fundamental change in the way we communicate? Dunno, but I want to know it from the inside, instead of the sidelines. So friend me or follow me, if you like, and let me know what you think.

(By the way, there are some things about Twitter that aren’t very intuitive… at least not to me. Like the difference between friend and follower, and that you can be a follower but not a friend, or vice versa. I’ll be collecting links here to tips, tricks, and tools. Hope they’ll be useful to you, too.)

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All a-Twitter

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