What is all the fuss about Twitter?

I've been spending the weekend trying to fathom Twitter.

Twitter has been a tough nut for me to conceptually crack. I remember stumbling upon Twittervision a while back, which gives an instant readout of random Twitter posts from around the globe. They seemed uniformly inane and banal, like eavesdropping on an endless stream of stupid cell phone conversations (“yeah, I'm in the Starbucks now, I'm getting the Venti with 2%”). It seemed so supremely pointless.

But I kept coming upon marketing blogs telling me that a Twitter presence is mandatory now. Against my ingrained prejudice, I took a deeper look, and I signed up.

I still can't quite tell you what Twitter is. It's a little like blogging, but it's not. It's like IM, but not. It's the most like Facebook I think, but better. Facebook works best (actually, only) with a group of people who are already connected, and already need to communicate stuff. It's an extension of a social space that already exists. It's not a great place to make connections you don't already have. You don't write stuff on a stranger's Wall, for instance. Twitter shares the social space sense of Facebook, but doesn't require a prior affinity with the members of that space. The risk threshold of linking to someone else, or of them linking to you, is low. You can write stuff and respond to people, but it's not like entering their room to do it. You're in a big public area where lots of other people are conversing too.

Twitter seems at its best when there is information sharing going on. I have found links to blogs and to information that I would never have stumbled upon any other way. For people I know, I'm seeing a more personal aspect of them that I wouldn't have access to otherwise. For people I don't, it doesn't take long to decide if they're worth keeping as a  source. If their posts are too personal or vapid, I don't need to keep seeing them. And if they are someone that appears interesting, it's likely that their affinity circle is too.

Twitter is not as easy to use as people say it is. There is an obscure hierarchy of types of communication that I don't quite understand, nor do I understand exactly how and when to do one or the other. It took me forever to find that there is a way to search for interests, because there's no search field as such on the main Twitter website. It's a separate web address, and I never would have found it but for a Twitter post. I've enabled my iPhone, but I don't know what that means. I don't see anything happening on it. It's probably because I have some gaping technological skill gaps, like texting. I don't know to do it. Really. And I've never sent an instant message in my life.

What I think the value of Twitter for me is to get more back and forth communication going on that is an extension of my blogging. I don't have the kind of blog that generates a lot of comment traffic (probably because I refuse to discuss whether Canon or Nikon is better), but I'd like to see more community develop around the blog. Twitter might be a way.

You can follow my Twitter posts here.

Comments

[Tommy Williams]

I don't find Twitter that interesting except as a way to feed the same status update to FriendFeed and Facebook. I much prefer FriendFeed due to the ability to comment on items and see "friend-of-a-friend" posts.

But there are far more people on Twitter than on FriendFeed and it's awfully tedious to create the "imaginary" friends (essentially, private FriendFeed accounts) for all the people I follow on Twitter that aren't on FriendFeed.

[David]

"Twitter seems at its best when there is information sharing going on. "

I think you're pretty much right on. I only started to really "get" twitter (aside from a way to share tidbits with existing friends) with the recent snowfall over on this side of the country ( http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23snow1219 ). The fact that one of my photos got passed around too on that hash tag was just icing on the cake!

[Joe Reifer]

Wait, you found something that's not vapid on Twitter?