I guess I first saw Twitter about… 2 months ago? I will freely admit, my first thought was, Why?
Finally overcome by curiosity, I decided the best way to answer that question was to start using it.
For those unfamiliar with Twitter, it’s something like a micro-blog, or personal, ongoing, state-diagram. You write, in 140 characters or less, what you’re doing right now. This is then saved, along with a time-stamp of sorts, in a long list of “what I was doing right now” web-bites. Naturally these are available in an RSS feed.
Of course, the minute you put anything in an RSS feed, it instantly becomes useful. If not useful, at least, usable: you can subscribe to it, aggregate it… um, well, you can do at least those two things. Depending on your perspective, they might be the same thing. You can follow other people’s twitter feeds, and other people can follow yours. You can throw the feed up on your web page (I just stuck mine in the sidebar).
So, you may be asking, why?
I don’t know; why not?
Why not? Because no-one is that interesting. It’s bad enough with the web full of content-lite blogs without twitter turning the noise-to-signal ratio up to 11.
It’s adding value for someone, because it’s sure getting a lot of use; I don’t think it’s entirely narcissistic use, either. I mean, I don’t imagine that anyone needs to know what I’m doing 24-7. And if that is truly all it amounts to, I can’t imagine myself continuing to use it.
But I thought I’d take a closer look at it before I dismissed it… I guess we’ll see.
Another thought on the success of twitter, thus far. I don’t think it’s so much because of the value of knowing exactly what a few of your peers are doing — I think it’s the illusion of proximity that’s created.
If a group of people are hanging out in a living room, there is a sense of community even if they are not all doing the same thing; a few might be playing cards, a few might be on a console video game, someone might be reading or web-surfing. But everyone’s in the same room — you can look around and see everyone in a split second.
Twitter, and related apps, seem to do this for the web. It negates the barries created by the huge distances that separate us, because someone can glance at a feed and see what Scoble, or their former work associate, or their co-developer in another country, are up to. It’s sort of a virtual version of glancing around the living room to see where everyone’s at.
Not saying this is exactly what’s going on, or even that it’s especially profound — but I think it’s more this than just being able to follow the minutae of people’s lives. If it were really just about that — well, as you said, “no-one is that interesting”, and then people would have just stopped using it.
Just some ruminations, that’s all.
What pixies were you listening to?
Hi Gregg; well, I have Trompe le Monde, Doolittle, and Surfer Rosa in my iTunes. I think it was something from Doolittle on at the time…