I’ve been Twittering for almost two years now and after being an early adopter who quickly turned naysayer, it’s now proving to be useful in a myriad of subtle and different ways.
It alerts me to breaking news (I heard of the Hudson River crash before anything featured on the BBC News website), provides movie, music and book recommendations, links to interesting websites and topics, and keeps me amused with that little touch of voyeuristic pleasure that is akin to sneak a peek into a living room window as you walk past.
I think it’s safe to say that, as Stephen Fry said last night, I get it.
I can’t recall the exact quote, nor who said it, but the true value of Twitter is only now being uncovered. The instant nature of the technology, the ease of use and forced brevity lend themselves to several different uses. Corporations are now looking at how they could use it internally, the marketers are trying to figure out how to leverage it, and everyone and their dog seems to be jumping on board.
Which brings me to the second quote that is now applicable to Twitter. It has, most definitely, jumped the shark (in the newer sense of the phrase). Anyone who has a Twitter account can probably sympathise here, with each day bringing a new ‘Follow’ request from a complete stranger (at best) to some company or other (at worst).
There has also, recently, been a spate of celebrities signing up. The good news is that they seem to ‘get it’ as well. The aforementioned Mr. Fry and Jonathan Ross both have Twitter accounts, personal accounts that is, not something created to help ‘market’ them. In the case of Jonathan Ross it’s been especially interesting to read his very personal thoughts as he returns to the TV screen. Time will tell how that will change of course.
Despite having hinted at it recently I’m not ditching Twitter, far from it. I will be locking things down a little more, and it’s likely I’ll start blocking people I don’t know, and thankfully whilst the Twitter website itself remains low in functionality, there are several Twitter clients out there which can help filter and manage what is, by nature, a high volume way of communicating.
I’m not entirely sure what the rising popularity of Twitter will bring but I am looking forward to finding out.
There’s certainly a lot more noise on Twitter these days.
People are having a lot more conversations with one another, and starting to treat Twitter more like a very-short email service.
All this public conversation may be ignorable by people who’ve installed filtering software, but for the rest of us Twitter’s starting to feel more and more diluted.
I’ve been a Twitter fan since it began precisely for the reasons you’ve outlined. I was delighted when Stephen Fry joined. I don’t yet know what to make of the sudden influx of other “names”. If they simply have a raft of followers then it just becomes another performance platform. It’s the interaction of Twitter that makes it interesting and useful.
Hmm, personally I think it is making blogs less interesting. If you have a job where you are sitting at a PC all day then you can keep up to date with all those bloggers who twitter away. If you are not then you just notice that the blog entries have less regular, the tweets are more regular and you can’t be bothered catching up, especially not where the tweets are HOURS after they happened and so the whole interaction thing is past tense or for other people. But I daresay the majority of bloggers and folk on the internet ARE sitting at a PC all day in their job. I’m in retail so not on a PC all day and am now a second-class internet citizen…
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