Not twittering yet? Wow, you are so yesterday, last week, a part of the LiveJournal or Yahoo! crowd. C’mon, get with the program and start laying out your interesting, exciting life, one 140-character chunk at a time!
After all, Shakespeare didn’t limit himself to just one 140 character play. In fact, I’m not sure what Shakespeare would make of twitter. Indeed, I don’t think you’ll find anything approaching Shakespeare’s quality in the microblogging service of twitter.
Instead, what you will find is exactly what you would’ve found about 8 years ago when blogging became all the rage, and everyone decided to start one (only to abandon it 3 weeks later for lack of anything interesting to say). Thankfully, twitter to the rescue! I mean, if you can’t find something interesting to say in a mere 140 characters, what are you on this Earth for?
For the rest of us, here are the 12 Great Things about Twitter(tm):
1. Twitter is intrinsically democratic… Or is it socialist? Everyone is your comrade, even celebrities. That’s probably more like socialism than it is democracy I have to admit. Perhaps Twitter is advancing socialist principles without knowing it?
2. People on twitter can be both boring and interesting to watch. Whee, look, someone posted what they ate for breakfast, again, for the 1,382nd time. Yay! It’s like watching bread rise in an oven. In the dark. That someone forgot to turn on.
3. People have described twitter as everything from an endless stream of conversation to a cocktail party, to a drunken date you forgot you had when you woke up the next morning. Unlike the drunken date, however, twitter won’t make you regret going to bed with it.
4. Twitter is your local pub, except better, because they aren’t actually people you know or care much about (especially if you’re following over 100 people), and you won’t actually notice if they pass away, get married (unless they livetweet it, yeah baby!), or otherwise do something interesting. But you won’t really know it’s interesting, because you’re already following way too many people to keep track of them all.
5. Twitter is playful, just like blogs used to be, but then weren’t any more because people realized you could connect the dots between what you wrote on the blog and a person’s real life. Oh, and I guess twitter will quickly wind up the same way as our online lives are all-too-quickly merging with our real-life personas. Except Second Life, of course. That will always be the safe place to have sex with a purple-headed alien.
6. Twitter breaks news before everyone else. How else would I learn about your Aunt Maggie’s heart attack, the shoplifting at the local Quik-E-Mart, or the fact that your dog is the neighborhood’s primo Daddy? In other words, news that doesn’t directly affect you or have any real impact in your life (but makes you feel excited as though you were actually a part of the story in some way). Wow, look, Twitter reported something 7 minutes before mainstream news caught wind of it. Yay! I am so up-to-date.
7. Who needs to get actual work done when you could twitter instead? Tweetdeck — a popular twitter application — basically forces you to take up your entire screen to twitter all day. So either you have multiple computers (you rich geek son-of-a-gun), or you’re not doing much other than twittering. A procrastinator’s dream (or nightmare!).
8. If you spend enough time on twitter, you can actually be your own investigative reporter, rooting out twitter corruption and insincerity amongst your vast number of followers. And since we’ve already established you’re not actually working much (see Great Thing #7), you can devote vast amounts of time that previously you had devoted to contributing to society for the public or your own good. Thank you!
9. Just like the now-hopelessly-outdated Web before it, there’s a lot of charity and nonprofit uses going on with twitter. Now, not only will every charity have one of those stupid, hopelessly outdated “websites,” they can also twitter their cause so that every time you RT them (retweet them), they will donate a penny to their own cause. Feels good to do something good without actually have to expend any real money or effort on your part, doesn’t it?
10. Who says Twitter isn’t just a popularity contest? Don’t tell that to people who get excited when a celebrity follows them, or some random Hollywood actor this week announces yet another “challenge” to another celebrity actor or mega-corporation. But unlike real life, you are an amazing part of this social experiment. How? Well, because you’re following these people. Ah. Yeah, just like reading “Us” magazine in real life.
11. Supposedly Twitter can drive traffic to websites, just like digg used to. We still get more traffic from Google, but I’m certain that’s going to change as soon as 10 million people retweet this article.
12. The twitter verbs can’t be any more exciting! Look, we’re all birds, flitting around hither and thro! You can tweet, twitter, or as Stephen Colbert might say, “twatted.” We’re no longer in a universe, we’re in a twitterverse. And when someone tweets, you can retweet their message to your own followers (much like the old telephone game — except there’s no telephone, no secret, and nobody much cares). Yes, this is flighty stuff.
(If you’re haven’t guessed, these are completely tongue-in-cheek. I’m sure Twitter has a legitimate use; I just haven’t figured it out yet. 😉 )
15 comments
This is good. I was reading this hoping that it was all tongue-in-cheek, but couldn’t tell as you nicely parodied the Twitter enthusiast. If people enjoy using Twitter, that’s fine. For me, I don’t quite get it. At my Web site, Twitter Backlash, I’ve commented on the morality and other aspects of Twitter that I believe need to be looked at as more people use it.
http://www.twitterbacklash.com
I’m late to the party with this whole Twitter thing, too. I’ve only had an account for a little over three weeks and already I’ve found it to be frustrating for three main reasons:
1. To me, it reinforces the notion that there’s nothing of worth to add to the public conversation. Because whatever message you want to tweet, someone else has already tweeted (!?) it. Twenty-five other people ate Cheerios for breakfast too, fifty other people already mentioned that news story you thought was breaking, & hundreds have already made that clever observation about everyone wants masks for swine flu but no one will wear a condom to protect themselves from AIDS. Yeah, everything’s been said and done. Bummer.
2. Twitter alone is a microcosm of the Internet in general. Like the Web at large, there’s information from both reliable and unreliable sources. And on Twitter, it’s remarkably easy to find both good & bad information. It won’t be long before school-aged kids begin citing tweets in their research papers. (Are the MLA & APA working on a citation style yet?)
3. My third gripe is all about information overload. I promised myself that I’d reduce my time spent on the Internet so that I could have more time to relax, exercise, de-stress, & goof off with other unstructured activities. There’s something about Twitter that’s compelling (probably the real-time nature of it all) & sticky. I made the mistake of typing in “Swine Flu” yesterday to see if I could pick up on the latest news story, & I got way more information than I bargained for. Instead of spending five minutes reading a single news story, I spent about two hours opening multiple tabs to multiple news stories thanks to multiple tweets that all sounded worthy of investigating. I was stuck in an information trap…on a nice 70 degree day when I could have been goofing around outside. Ugh.
My sentiments exactly after reading the above comment from Adam and reading his site’s comments about the lack of effort and sentiment in this technology. Besides, how devoid of existence are these people who focus on this communication style?
And, at risk to raise the ire of Dr Grohol, does it reinforce addiction-type behavior of those using the technology of the internet? Or, is this post tongue in cheek and I missed that sentiment?
OK, reading it again, I guess I missed the tongue in cheek comment at the end, so my mistake. But, why give it validation by mentioning it in somewhat of a positive vein in the first place?
Actually this a pretty good list john and infact twitter core team too won’t be able to come up with something new to add in the list.
I think you are not an average twitter user 🙂
Abhimanyu
http://mwolk.com/blog
I read the first one, and then I stopped reading. I mean, come on, you really HAD to go for the socialist argument to ridicule Twitter? You nearly called it communist, well done… This reminds me of the Godwin law, but for communism…
Mind you, this could have been an interesting discussion, even a little tongue-in-cheek, but no…
We’re all equal in the twitterverse, so a comparison to socialism — where all people are supposedly on equal footing ideally — is not unwarranted.
I wasn’t going for the in-depth, serious discussion in this article, sorry! 🙂
I see some benefits of Twitter such as the speed at which one can connect to others and spread important news that sometimes needs to be spread quickly, such as an Amber Alert; however, this is exactly what’s wrong with it.
We, PEOPLE, are social beings–we require intimacy, touch, friendship and bonding but I feel technology has pushed us too far into the wrong kind of social connection. We are always “plugged in”. (When is the last time your cell phone was off for 24hrs straight? When have you forgotten your phone and not turned back home to go get it?)
More than ever, people are sending texts, e-mails, tweets (or whatever) to others as means of communication rather than actually calling them or visiting in person. It is even acceptable to not visit someone on a holiday as long as you send them a pretty, well-written e-card.
Also, this constant connection is expected. I’ll share a few personal examples…
1: It’s my friend’s birthday, we hang out, I give her a gift, we celebrate, but she complains how I didn’t text her Happy Birthday earlier that morning.
Example 2: It’s New Year’s Eve, the countdown has just reached zero so it is now a new year…my friend is texting everyone to say Happy New Year faster than I could even take a sip of cider. She gets upset when a person or two she texted didn’t write back, not understanding that they may we with family, asleep, or simply satisfied with reading the messege and don’t feel the need to respond.
Example 3: While having a conversation with my friend (in person) she is texting nonstop, having conversations with multiple other people. This is BEYOND rude, but seems to now be socailly acceptable.
Example 4: While driving my friend hears a beep from her phone and “has to” respond to the text or at leat pick up the phone and look to see what the sender had to say simply because they wrote to her.
Example 5: I get made fun of for not checking my MySpace account often enough and people actually get offended that I don’t log-in to check if they’ve sent my anything.
The list can go on and on, but my point is simply this: We are too connected by gadgets and technology and we’re slowly forgetting what it is to be human. We smile through a keyboard 🙂 and no longer our mouthes. We completely change languange, not for the better with text/IM/e-mail jargon such as LOL, ROLF, L8R, SK8R, OMFG, and plenty more I have yet to learn. Do the benefits of such connection outweigh what is happening to our culture–our vulnerable youth?
I leave you with a very appropriate yet saddening quote by Albert Einstein: “It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.”
I couldn’t agree more, Albert, I couldn’t agree more.
After you find out how high is up,what’s beyond that?