My next installment of the "why I do (or don't do) the things that I do (or don't do)" series stems from the last one that I wrote about why I'm not on Facebook. I mentioned in there that I would rather go the route of having several disparate services that I can aggregate rather than the one-stop-shop (and time suck) that is the Facebook universe. Amongst those services which I use, Twitter garnered a lot of comments and thus, my decision to post my reasons for using it in order to answer some questions and comments that I received in relation to it.
The most prolific objection that I hear to Twitter is that it is just a self-indulgent and narcissistic status update to show everyone how important you are, and that nobody wants to know what a person is doing every minute of the day (which is true). There are some people - usually celebrities - that post a lot about stupid stuff. Generally, nobody wants to know if you're in the bathroom, watching TV, or just walking around at the mall. In that respect, those who use Twitter as mainly just a "I'm doing this right now" update in an attempt to feel important kind of make a bad name for the rest of us. The worst offense in my book are those famous people who constantly pimp the shows of their other famous friends on Twitter, or users who constantly pimp themselves in a "vote for me for best..." kind of way.
But Twitter can be a lot more useful, and so here's why I choose to use Twitter as my "status updater" as opposed to anything else. And away we go...
- Microblogging. WIRED had an article that mentioned this, and it sums up my feelings immaculately. When blogging first started, people posted about everything - including short little blips of cool websites, stupid thoughts, and one-liners that they heard or wanted to pass along. I found, however, logging into my blogging software to post pithy little statements or short blips to be overly onerous and generally didn't do it due to the overhead involved in actually posting a full-on blog entry. Plus, I didn't want to waste space and cause other, more interesting entries to scroll off the main page because I was blasting out a link to the latest Penny Arcade comic or something. With the 140-character limit, Twitter has removed that element from most blogs entirely such that now most of the content is meatier and more worth spending time to read at the site. It takes away a lot of the clutter and leaves the important stuff hanging around.
- Mobility. I use my phone a LOT, and there are so many Twitter apps for phones now that it could safely be called ubiquitous. It's so much easier to tweet from my phone than to blog about something, and many times I don't want to go into great detail about a subject I could tweet about; oftentimes I just want to post a picture and a pithy comment, or describe (in 140 characters or less) some amazingly silly thing I just witnessed. With Twitter, and my go-to Pre app Tweed, I can do that anywhere.
- Thoughts, not diatribes. Twitter is perfect for capturing those "things that make ya go hmmm" moments that don't need a lot of exposition, and it can be a great holding zone for things that I may want to comment on later but don't have time or equipment to comment on at length at the present moment. Sometimes a stream of consciousness can tell you a lot about a person, even if it is random, disjointed, and non-sequitorial. I don't have to spend an hour composing, checking, rewording, and rethinking a tweet like I may do for a blog post. Tweets don't even have to be complete thoughts, just something out there to get the point across. Quick points, not discussions.
- An RSS feed analog that doesn't need a browser. Most blogging software has widgets that will update Twitter every time the poster makes a new entry, which is great for following people who don't post on a regular schedule and when I'm away from a browser with an RSS feed client. I have friends that post on a random schedule that also use Twitter, and so it's nice to be alerted that something new has gone up without me having to check it every day. On the other hand, it's great to have a site like Engadget, which seems to post every 5 minutes on some days, post to Twitter where I can see the article headers and only follow the links I want to read as opposed to constantly monitoring my browser and refreshing the page. When I'm mobile, as I am much more these days, Twitter makes a great RSS feed replacement to keep me informed on things that are important to me.
- Redundancy. Long-time readers will know that my blog machine crashed a few months ago, and Twitter allowed me to keep people informed on what was going on. Twitter is offsite, so it will (theoretically) always be available as an alternate means of communication. With the Twitter widget that now appears on the BrainDrain sidebar, as long as there's a static page to display (meaning that as long as apache is running), I can still post updates via Twitter, even when I can't update the blog itself.
- A different audience. There are people that I follow and interact with on Twitter that I don't interact with any other way and having my blog posts show up on Twitter may drive new traffic to the blog from time to time. Additionally, there is a "public timeline" on Twitter that is a constant update of every tweet as it comes in. Theoretically, then, someone whom I don't know could catch an update post on Twitter, follow that to the blog, and find that they like what they see and I could wind up with a new reader or a new follower on Twitter. Who knows, perhaps that might even end up being a new communications point and I gain a friend out of it. Stranger things have happened, but it's a possibility that I would like to exploit when possible.
- Membership is not required. One of my main beefs with Facebook is that membership is required even to view pages, and that is not the case with Twitter. Even if you're not a member, you can read tweets unless the person has explicitly marked them as private. While this openness may be daunting to some - it's basically like having an IM conversation with the entire internet - I find it to be yet another avenue to get my thoughts and personality out there for whoever wants to read it. Do I think that there are a bunch of people hanging on my every word? No. But I do know that there are a few people that like to check in on what's going on with me from time to time, and I post and tweet for them.
- Advertising. I will tweet about things in an effort to advertise them because I know that I will go places my friends have gone and liked. If I tweet something like, "At Mooyah Burgers....mmmm, tasty, tasty!", that's an endorsement from me saying that the place is great and that you should try it. It is less "this is what I'm doing right this instant" and more "you should try this because I like it and think you would too." In some cases, I'll use it as a direct shill for something (e.g. "Life On Loan's got a show tonight - you should come!") but for the most part it is more of a passing endorsement of whatever product I choose to tweet about...the electronic equivalent of "word of mouth".
And so there you have it. Not necessarily an exhaustive list, but the most important points that came to mind. Again, this is also not meant as a conversion missive, to come join the ever-growing masses of the cult of Twitter. It is merely an answer to many questions that I have received and an effort to expose yet more of my thought processes to you, my loyal readers. If there are some new Twitterers that result from this, great. If not, I'm going to keep on tweeting because I love the idea and it has now become a permanent part of my online experience.
So, good luck, godspeed, and I'll be tweeting atcha.
