So, sometime after I got sick, but after the medication/zombie/insomniac thing I went through this weekend, I signed up for Twitter. This was on behest of a friend who in an email told me, “Hi! Yes, this is stupid. But I thought I’d try it out. Join Twitter.”With an introductory offer like that how can I not try it out?
I’ve been hearing about Twitter on all the geek blogs and productivity sites in my rounds on the RSS feeds I read. There are literally only two responses. “This is addictive. I love it. I use it all the time!” or “This is a stupid waste of time. Why do I need this? What is this for?”
I think the differences in opinion come from their approach to the social web application experience. If you want to connect with people and create a (false) sense of intimacy, Twitter is for you. If you want new ways of doing things that strictly increase productivity, and help you do old things in new, more efficient ways, Twitter might not be for you. I’m not sure where I am on this particular service.
For those of you that don’t know, Twitter is a sort of mini-blog tool. It’s dead simple to use from a phone (not in Korea) or from a computer. I use GAIM (Pidgin now) to update a page on Twitter. I could also do it directly from their website, but it’s easier to use my messenger client since I have that running all the time anyway. Twitter only supports 160 characters per post, so it’s not actually a full on second website to maintain. It’s more for short messages, reminders, lists, or keeping track of what friends or family members are up to. It’s absolutely dead simple to use.
I guess it’s useful to keep in touch with friends. Just tonight I got some updates on what friends were doing even thought they hadn’t blogged and didn’t send me email. Perhaps they messaged me on their phone? Maybe they were online, but not available to chat.
It’s certainly easier than email since all your friends can easily get the message almost anywhere easily. I get to track what my friends say during the day if they twitter. It’s something akin to ICQ’s offline messaging. It’s a little like that, except you can share it with everyone too if you want and add RSS feeds and whatnot.
There are all sorts of things people do with it. Some people will tweet EXCESSIVELY about every single thing they do. “Putting on my socks.” Twenty seconds later. “Putting on my shoes…” That’s a little scary and I don’t really need to get that much detail. I get plenty of feeling of “sharing” my life with this website, I don’t need to share everything all the time.
I’ll tweet stuff I’d like friends to see, but wouldn’t post about, or perhaps use it to keep up with friends when they aren’t online. There are some applications that make use of Twitter, but I haven’t found anything super efficient to do with it yet. Random webcomics? Whatever.
Another friend wrote, “My expectation is that the novelty of posting short statements will quickly wear off.” I agree with him. I’m willing to give it a try, but I’m not really sure what I think of it at the moment. I don’t add things to the “public timeline”, I have an invite only account at the moment.
Add me if you want: Torgodevil.
