My favorite web comic, xkcd, has another take on the Twitter question.
Be sure to read the tooltip. (That means put your mouse anywhere over the comic and leave it there for a moment. An additional message will appear. Read it quickly.)
Monday, October 20, 2008
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Twitter Revisited
In my last post I asked the eternal question, "What about Twitter?" And I was not exactly overwhelmed with responses. (Update: as of my latest read, 20 October 2008, exactly two people have responded, though they each have more than one comment.) No one in my little circle seemed to care very much. Except "EB". (BTW, if you're reading this and you are ok with me using your name, just let me know and I'll edit.) EB is a prolific blogger and has noticed that the bloggers to whom she looks up all seem to use Twitter, so she shared my curiousity. We made a deal. We'd both sign up for Twitter, follow each other, and see what happened.
Remember Christmas morning when you were a kid? I don't know about your experience, but for me Christmas morning was great. A bunch of new stuff to play with, all of it bright and shiny and new. I played with everything, all at once. By afternoon I had settled down into playing with one thing at a time, but still wanted to give everything its due.
But after a couple days, maybe a week or a month or two--memory fades with time, and it's been a while--the novelty wore off and my new Christmas presents somehow became just toys. I still played with them. Some of them. But they weren't really special anymore, they were just there.
Twitter is like that, only smaller and not as much fun. EB and I enjoyed twittering at each other for the first hour or two. The rest of that day and the day after we half-heartedly updated our respective statuses because, hey, we made a deal. We were in this together, experimenting. Then I went away for a weekend, didn't want to be bothered by Twitter, and when I got back EB and I both agreed that we'd had enough.
So there's the answer: Twitter isn't all that. It's not even part of that. For us, it completely lacked even the faintest whisper of that. And that, as they say, is that.
Until just now when I read yet another blog post from a friend. Turns out he uses Twitter as part of a convoluted chain of technologies that allow him to post text messages from his cellphone to his Facebook page (not just his status, but right to the wall) and to the homepage of his public website. And, in the process, he also gets his blog posts to his Facebook page and his public website. Cool stuff.
So ok, Twitter has its uses. If you want to turn SMS text messages into an RSS feed so you can pipe it somewhere, great, use Twitter. And if you're an uber-blogger or other cyber-celebrity whose groupies want to know where you are and what you're doing at all times, great, use Twitter. But for me, yawn. I wish the Twitter people well, I just wish them well without me.
Remember Christmas morning when you were a kid? I don't know about your experience, but for me Christmas morning was great. A bunch of new stuff to play with, all of it bright and shiny and new. I played with everything, all at once. By afternoon I had settled down into playing with one thing at a time, but still wanted to give everything its due.
But after a couple days, maybe a week or a month or two--memory fades with time, and it's been a while--the novelty wore off and my new Christmas presents somehow became just toys. I still played with them. Some of them. But they weren't really special anymore, they were just there.
Twitter is like that, only smaller and not as much fun. EB and I enjoyed twittering at each other for the first hour or two. The rest of that day and the day after we half-heartedly updated our respective statuses because, hey, we made a deal. We were in this together, experimenting. Then I went away for a weekend, didn't want to be bothered by Twitter, and when I got back EB and I both agreed that we'd had enough.
So there's the answer: Twitter isn't all that. It's not even part of that. For us, it completely lacked even the faintest whisper of that. And that, as they say, is that.
Until just now when I read yet another blog post from a friend. Turns out he uses Twitter as part of a convoluted chain of technologies that allow him to post text messages from his cellphone to his Facebook page (not just his status, but right to the wall) and to the homepage of his public website. And, in the process, he also gets his blog posts to his Facebook page and his public website. Cool stuff.
So ok, Twitter has its uses. If you want to turn SMS text messages into an RSS feed so you can pipe it somewhere, great, use Twitter. And if you're an uber-blogger or other cyber-celebrity whose groupies want to know where you are and what you're doing at all times, great, use Twitter. But for me, yawn. I wish the Twitter people well, I just wish them well without me.
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