What Makes Twitter So Cool
I’ve been an avid blogger for a couple of years now. Sometimes I just get the urge to micro-blog, or live-blog. That means I want to post just snippets of text or code about what I’m currently into, or what I’m currently thinking. Full-fledged posts sometimes take the wind out of me because I have to think what to write, look for links (if ever I need to cite any info), or even worry about my grammar and spelling. There have been times when I’ve posted one-liners!
But when I re-conceptualized my blog, I thought of focusing more on substantial posts. After all, it’s a waste of online real estate to just post one-liners. They’re not very good for SEO, and readers might think I’m a lazy poster (sometimes I am!). And nobody really reads those one-liners, much less post on the comment threads. After all, you can’t respond to a one-liner post much. Same goes if it’s just one short paragraph.
But when I started a Twitter account, I just got hooked. I enjoyed being able to post those one-line messages somewhere. And what’s even better is that people actually respond to my “tweets,” no matter how nonsensical or trivial they are.
My short (and very inconclusive) analysis: it’s because of the network aspect of Twitter that gives it so much interaction. Blogs sure are interactive, but your “friends” in blogging are loosely-defined—there are the blogrolls, in-post links, and such. But with Twitter and other more social systems, your friends are defined, and they get automagically updated whenever you post something. Hey, you can also post from IM or even through your mobile phone via SMS.
Sure, you also get these on other social networks that bundle in blogging services, like MySpace, Friendster, and even Multiply. But Twitter makes it so cool, in that you don’t even have to give much effort in what you write. After all, you’re limited to 140 words. And it’s mostly just to answer the question “what are you doing right now?”
So, what are you doing right now? Here’s what I’ve been up to lately.
“you’re limited to 140 words” – it’s 140 characters, right?
nightfox said this on April 15, 2007 8:00 pm
LOL. It’s 140 characters, indeed. Thanks for the correction.
jangelo said this on April 16, 2007 1:26 am
[...] Last time I raved about Twitter, the latest hot thing in the Web 2.0 world (okay, it’s been up for quite a while now, but it’s only now that its popularity is taking off). But not everyone is happy with Twitter. And they do have their reasons. One such person is Abe Olandres, erstwhile editor of the Blog Herald, and my problogger compatriot. He cites five reasons why we won’t see him on Twitter. [...]
The Argument Against Twitter » Jack Of All Blogs said this on April 17, 2007 11:23 pm
[...] What makes Twitter so cool [...]
I Just Ditched FireFox in Favor of Safari and Camino | The J Spot said this on April 24, 2007 4:52 am
[...] Personally, I fell I’m already hooked on Twitter. Sometimes it makes me unproductive (reading about what people are doing rather than actually doing work). Last time I tried installing add-ons to my personal blog, I tried the Twitter Tools plugin by alexking. This let me automatically publish a daily summary of tweets, a decision I have since come to regret, as several readers complained about not getting the same quality (???) writing as with my usual posts–most didn’t care what I was doing at 4 in the morning, or such trivial stuff. So I took it out. [...]
Twitter on the New York Times at The Blog Herald said this on April 26, 2007 8:52 pm