twitter's tweets

So I signed up for twitter this weekend, and I have to say the jury is really out on this one. I mean, I can barely understand the huge appeal of blogging, RSS, and non-job social networking (myspace and facebook) — so why would I understand twitter?

In case you haven't heard of it, twitter.com lets you set up an account for broadcasting your mood. It's like IM status, without the IMs. All status all the time; all one way communication. Blogging for the severely ADD. Instead of getting a feed reader, you just set it up to text all your incoming streams to your phone, because you need more interruptions in your life to make you more efficient, right?

So perhaps I'm sounding so negative on it that there would appear to be no point to me even signing up. Except that's not so: what's interesting to me about twitter is that it creates a new kind of socializing; a new way to be connected with friends and family and strangers. Online personae are becoming something that more and more people have — it's not just a handful of geeks on IRC, or MOO, or tinyMUD, but rather a full-blown epidemic of artsy types finding ways to express themselves to a broader audience. In addition to the social implications, there's the possibility that an intelligent blogger in India could now earn a decent living from Google ads alone. Soon, this blogger may also need to twitter regularly, to remind her readers that she can be interesting in 140 characters or less as well as in longer articles. Twitter is becoming big enough to be part of an online persona that may someday be as important as having a nice shirt or a decent haircut: so it's time to sign up, and see how it works.

How it seems to work varies a lot according to who you follow. Some people twitter whatever silly thing crosses their mind. You won't follow them for long. Some people put so much thought and effort into deciding what clever thing they should tweet every 12 hours that you can spend minutes looking for the hidden meanings behind what they're saying. But I think most are just trying to be a little cool, and stay connected. And that's what the internet is all about.

twitter.com/osric