How I Learned To Love Twitter, Even A Little Late
I can safely say that no technology I have tested in recent memory has prompted the same blank stares from my family members and friends as Twitter.
“Twitter??? What is this?” was the response from my flatmate, herself an early Facebook user, when I sent her a friendly Twitter invitation.
“You seriously want me to use this?” immediately questioned my younger brother, the acknowledged technophile of our family, when he received his personal invitation to join the “micro-blogging” service.
And to all those skeptical, incredulous stares, I countered: Just give it a chance.
A micro-blogging service that allows users to send ‘tweets’ of up to 140 characters answering the question “what are you doing now”, Twitter is certainly a somewhat befuddling concept and one that takes a little bit of getting used to. Yet as Facebook (my personal social network of choice) becomes increasingly complicated with new privacy controls, groupings, and filters, I am finding the simple, minimalist unfussiness of Twitter and its 140 character limit ever more appealing.
Being an early evangelist of the Twitter is no easy task, however, and while the technology world seems to have for the most part accepted Twitter as the next mode of constant communication, it’s hard to tell whether the service will ever appeal to the masses in the same way as a MySpace, Facebook or even LinkedIn.
There is one thing, however, that Twitter really has going for it in comparison to the competition and that is it’s pure, unabashed simplicity. While blogging takes time, insight and motivation, Twitter allows you to instantly and instinctively react to your world without filtering or developing that thought beyond its immediate form.
Twitter fans tweet about events large and small, from last-minute dinner invitations to election news to their children’s bouts with the common cold, and it is these seemingly insignificant details that give real insight into their lives beyond the public profiles presented on blogs and social networks.
While it may seem odd, useless, or even just plain silly, I will argue that there is something unique about Twitter’s utter lack of frivolity.
Joining the twittosphere may require something of a leap of faith, but as social networking sites become increasingly convoluted, in my opinion it may just be one worth taking.
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Dan Keldsen