About a year ago, someone mentioned Twitter to me. If I recall correctly, it was my friend and digital ally, Justin Thorp. I signed up, looked at the home page for a moment and went on my way—elsewhere.
In January, I decided to really give Twitter a solid go. I signed in, found a few friends and started updating. Within a few days, I was really beginning to enjoy the community aspect of Twitter. I tied in my mobile phone and “tweeted” more frequently.
A couple of months later, the light bulb moment happened. I was at SXSW in Austin, Texas. It seemed like everyone there was on Twitter. So many amazing events unfolded at the conference, many of them driven by conversation on Twitter. Who can forget the botched interview of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg? Quite literally, the emotion of the crowd was driven by 140-character rants on Twitter. The sheer power of communicating in such a simple way was astounding.
Today, I think I’ve come full circle in my opinion of Twitter. It is fantastic and it is garbage. For community, it has few real rivals right now. But as web applications go, it is really nothing special. In fact, Twitter is routinely down and struggling because of the volume of traffic on the site and poor development. Yet it remains a constant for many people throughout the workday or weekend.
Twitter has its own language, built around tweets, tweeps and at-replies. But Twitter really is a simple thing. It truly is about the simple question, “What are you doing?” (Feel free to extend that to “thinking, feeling, studying”, etc.) And it matters, I think. Sure, not everything that happens on Twitter has intrinsic value. But I think the ultimate ROI can be significant. Follow the people you care about. Find new friends or re-connect with old friends. Leave the rest alone.
If you’d like to follow me on Twitter, you will get much more information about the things I am interested in, what is happening at work, at home and everywhere in between. Just hit http://twitter.com/davidrussell.
I’ll follow you as well. Let me know how to reach you on Twitter.
Tagged: Twitter, communication, web
Justin Thorp
2008-07-02 1329hrs
I’m glad that you came around and decided to use Twitter. :-) With both of us being so busy lately, it’s been a great way to stay in touch.
I think they’ll figure the bugs out. They have to figure it out before the system goes really mainstream.
A Lindsay Lohan or a Paris Hilton are going to get their hands on Twitter and then everyone and their brother will be using the system.
John
2008-07-03 1545hrs
http://twitter.com/seedthrower
Thanks for the post - makes sense - but beautiful and garbage - difficult at times to determine which is which at times - sort of like life don’t you think?