In the past few weeks Twitter has hit the news quite often, but I notice people still don't really understand its value. For those dinosaurs who haven't heard of Twitter, it's a micro-blogging site to write in short notices what you're doing. You can follow others and others can follow you.
But most people take the words "What are you doing?" too literally, making a caricature of it. They really think Twitter is only about useless messages like "scratching my leg" or "watering the flowers". I had the same stance before I subscribed, but realized it is far more than this. The following points list what Twitter makes useful to me:
- Twitter is a nice way to keep up with a community (or be part of it). You'll get to know the people in the community better, by reading what they're occupied with outside the field you know him/her from.
- It's easy to share things with your peers, like an announcement, an interesting article or a nice picture.
- It's an excellent medium for asking questions. If you have the right public you'll get an answer almost immediately.
- An excellent way to dump your frustrations. I'm sure this has a therapeutic value.
Reading about (tiny) frustrations from others can be entertaining too. - I follow some sites which I used to follow with RSS, and now with Twitter.
- It's a nice exercise to write statements which are to the point, due to the 140 character limit. It's an art of its own to cram as much information as possible into this limited amount of text.
I believe these six points are reason enough to keep using it. Again, these reasons are not apparent from the surface. They will come clear as soon you're going to use it.
As a sidenote, some people complain of an information overload. I don't think it's a valid excuse not to use Twitter. Because it's your account and you choose if you wish to follow 100 or more people. Or, you can choose not to read everything. With a few followers it's possible to catch up, but with more than 50 people you can decide to only read the last 20 messages in your Twitter stream.
So the main point I wanted to make in this post is to just try Twitter if you are sceptical about using it. After all, it's human nature to be scared of something for which they don't know.
Here's how I described it
Here's how I described it on Devin Townsend's forums. There were a whole lot of people there who were quite sceptical about Twitter and I felt the need to educate them.
I don't understand what people's gripe with Twitter is, without ever giving it a try first. When I first heard of the concept, I didn't see the point either but now that I've used it for a while, I quite like it. It's nothing what I expected, people do not describe what their poop looks like (sorry Dev) and if they do and it bothers you, don't follow them!
It's really not about people feeling self-important, it does not stimulate 'herd behaviour'. It's about communicating with people you know or who share an interest.
When posting a Tweet, you're allowing people to read what you are dealing with at that particular moment - and most importantly to interact with you, communicate with you. Provide ideas, thoughts, tips, jokes. And it allows me to interact with other people in the same way.
And I think it's great to know that Dev is trying out new strings, that Switzerland has a much more active metal community than Textures expected, that Oceansize have about 30 songs to compile an EP, that my classmate missed the bus for the 5th time in a week, that my brother is busy with school and not coming home this weekend, that Mogwai are playing in my city in a few weeks, and so on. All things that I would have found out one way or another, but now they're neatly delivered to my desktop for me to take notice when it suits me. I don't have to handle phone calls and text messages, people IM-ing me when I'm busy, scavenge blogs and websites, hear rumours via via from friends. What I want to know is there, what I don't want to know is not there.
And in the same way I think that other people will be happy to hear from me that Ki is available for pre-order, that their website isn't working properly, to hear a compliment about their photograph, that the soccer game between Liverpool and Chelsea is worth watching, that there's a nice festival full of local bands next weekend, or even that I can't make pancakes. For the very same reasons.
It's not dumb, stupid, shit(e), crap, 'cheaper assed facebook', 'no-brain activity'. It's convenient and fun.