Twitter: I begrudgingly get it

More than two years ago, I made a post on here about how I didn't get Twitter. It's one of the most popular posts I've ever made for some reason, which perhaps I'm not proud of. I been meaning to follow up on that for, well, at least a year, because obviously things have changed a great deal.

My view was skewed in some respects because I never looked at it much outside of the context of technology circles. In its earlier days, Twitter was dominated by attention whoring tech pundits, and that seemed boring to me. These days, it enjoys more widespread use, but there are still some critical points that measure how effective it is as a communications medium, and furthermore, it serves different people different ways.

That 80% of people never post anything and have few followers indicates to me that a lot of people are tending a flock, and that's OK. In reality, this is a lot like any other Internet media we have, whether it be blogs or Web sites as a whole. It's a minority that publishes content while the vast majority are consumers only. This has been true for a long time. In fact, the forums on my sites over the years have always been a 95% read-only affair. Many view, few post.

The development community has a much more robust two-way audience. Its effectiveness is rooted in using the right tools, like TweetDeck, to follow not individuals, but hash tags and search terms that matter to you. You get and give help pretty quickly. There's a lot of re-tweet noise, unfortunately.

The bigger story is that it has finally achieved a more critical mass, making it useful by volume. So these days, yes, I'll admit that Twitter is useful if you cast out the attention whoring. Yesterday, I got RT'd by @scottgu, and within an hour, added 15 new followers. Can't argue with that as a means to get your words out. (Wonderfalls reference!)

3 Comments

  • Yes its true that twitter has gained popularity in recent years, its mainly because the post can be sent as an sms, email in no time. I think twitter is going to continously rock as more and more people use it as a great social bookmarking tool.

  • I really don't understand why the attention whores bother with Twitter when they could post video, photos, links, and (gasp!) more than 160 characters of text on Tumblr and not have to use things like twiddeo, twitpic, bit.ly, etc. to get around Twitter's lack of features.

    Twitter is basically like RSS that's easier for people to see and understand. In particular, non-web-savvy business managers can understand it. It's a hell of a lot easier to explain how Twitter can help a business than "lets post a public feed of information in XML, which people will consume via aggregator software and websites!"

    Unlike a blog, no one has to dedicate a considerable amount of time to writing any actual content. And with the 160-character limit, the fourth-grade-level writing ability of most businesspeople isn't going to be as apparent on Twitter, cutting down the chances of alienating potential customers with paragraphs full of spelling and grammar errors. And so Twitter catches on in the biz world.

    The reports of 80% of twits not twittering are not a forecast of doom for Twitter. It just means that Twitter's being used the way it should be - as a way to disseminate and consume information, rather than people trying to treat it as if it was a full-fledged social network.

  • I agree with most of what you've said. I think Twitter's greatest utility is that it's almost an RSS alternative. Nothing of value itself is ever posted there, only links to stuff that is valuable.

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