I’ve gone from calling Twitter dumb, to eating Twitter crow and admitting a minor Twitter addiction. As if to add an explanation point to that progression, I ended up talking to Sam Diaz from the Washington Post on the same topic last week. (See Life, In Little Chirps: Introducing Twitter, a Web Experiment In the Mass Appeal of Mundane Details.) One of Sean’s first questions was “who cares?” This seems like a fairly valid question given the kind of Twitters that regularly appear on the public timeline. That being said, you could have asked the same question about blogs. Sure, they can suck, but some are good, and those are worth reading. My main point was if we assume a Twitter feed is high quality (and if it isn’t, I’m not reading it), then it just becomes another way to keep up with friend’s lives. As I said in the article, imagine the equivalent number of daily phone calls it would take to get the same basic visibility that five minutes of scrolling through thirty friend’s Twitter feeds would give. It makes me tired just thinking about it.
Now if I can just convince more friends to Twitter, I’ll never have to actually talk to anybody.
So, I have to admit I’ve been following your twitters and have a few conclusions:
1) It feels more alienated and voyeuristic than blogs do. Kind of like if I got to keep up with you by watching you through a camera I put in your house. It lacks the quippy interaction of texting or chatting, and even blogs let you post boring comments like this one :-)
2) Twitters lack context. It would be better if a twitter included more context than it does. I imagine it takes you more time than it is worth to include enough to be interesting, but not so much that you are blogging through your twitter hole.
3) Twittering needs appropriate lifestyle infrastructure. Twitters seem like something that should go into a disposable portion of my blackberry (or other mobile device) that fade after a certain amount of time if they don’t happen to catch my attention. Having them flow into my reader isn’t very satifying. I’m sure the right software/hardware combos are out there to help me make twittering an important part of my life, but I haven’t figured it out yet. I looked up Quicksilver since you mentioned it in your first post, but found it was only for the Mac.
On the bright side, I’m an information whore. The more windows you give me the more I’ll look through :-) It’s a poor substitute for seeing you in person though.