When I joined Twitter in early January, at the urging of my friend and fellow blogger Denis (@denisvacher) it was essentially for the same reason I joined Myspace back in 2005: understand the concept. In the case of Myspace, I used it for a month or so and then dropped it completely when I understood that it held nothing for me.
Six months of twitter usage later, I thought it would be good to take stock. In the first few weeks when people asked me "what is it useful for?" I would usually answer "Nothing, but it's fun". Now I'm more nuanced although I have to acknowledge that understanding what it's useful for is tricky, not to mention explaining it...
Still, let's give it a try. I'm assuming here you know at least the basic concepts behind twitter. If you don't, you can check out the wikipedia entry. Just to give you a sense for what we're talking about, I currently have 246 registered followers and follow 127 myself. Out of the 246 I suspect a good 50 or so (at least) are spammers, fronts for porn sites and all the rest of the money-making machine that it the internet. Still, 200 followers in 6 months is probably not bad although it of course pales in comparison with Stephen Fry's 700 396. As a comparison measure, I have around 600 RSS subscribers for Fiberevolution, roughly 100 for Musical Ramblings and an unspecified low number for the recently launched Apprenti Photographe.
There are a number of things I like about twitter:
- it acts as a meta rss feed pointing to interesting tidbits of news and blogging in a readable format that casts a wider net than a regular rss aggregator would allow me to do
- it has allowed me to reconnect with a number of friends and ex-colleagues whose daily lives I feel I follow a little more closely now, without being the information overload that is facebook
- it seems to drive some traffic to my blogs when I tweet about a post (which I don't do systematically except for the daily photo on Apprenti Photographe) It's not huge, and it couldd be mostly delayed traffic (which I would have gotten through regular RSS) although when people RT it becomes more significant, obviously
- unlike my blogs, it's an aggregated medium that doesn't force me to segment the different parts of my life, something that I appreciate a lot. I don't feel guilty being multi-faceted on twitter the way I would on my blogs
- the 140 character meme is an interesting concept that forces to concision in sometimes interesting ways
There are a number of things I don't like about twitter:
- the fact that different clients allow different things is annoying, and the fact that my blackberry client is especially crap is very annoying. Obviously, most of my tweeting is done from my blackberry and the fact that it doesn't highlight replies, doesn't reproduce mentions from non subscribers, doesn't allow tweetpics, etc. is crap. Maybe there's a better one out there, but having to search for it and change on a regular basis is also a hassle. Another good reason to consider an iPhone as my next device...
- some tweeters are inconsiderate in their tweeting, at least as far as I'm concerned. Receiving over 3 tweets in a row is annoying. When your whole Friends Feed is eaten by tweets by a single person, it's time to unfollow. Also, things like tweeting your GPS location repeatedly just because you can is stupid. And it's annoying that you have to unfollow these people even though they might also be sending interesting stuff...
All in all though, I have to say that I find it's a positive experience, and I intend to continue to tweet. I'm still hard pressed to answer quickly what it's used for, but I find it very complimentary to blogging as a faster broadcast tool than RSS, I find it fun to use as well and I find it has some of the qualities of social networking without the (to me) immense drawbacks of confidentiality loss and trivia flood.
So if you haven't joined yet, I encourage you to do so, and of course your first follow should be http://www.twitter.com/Fiberguy !
