The first few months I used Twitter I found it an amusing diversion, but could really take it or leave it. Lately though, I am finding it much more compelling. A few things account for this – first, as always with such things, there is more of a critical mass. While some of my actual buddies don’t update often enough (ahem), other entities and ‘big names’ that I follow provide interesting content pretty consistently. I pipe my Twitter feed over to Facebook (I really can’t abide Facebook’s interface – find it very confusing) so this provides an easy way for me to do ‘status updates’ in FB without having to be on FB. Thus, I get feedback/comments and have conversations both at Twitter and at Facebook.
I am sometimes curious why people I don’t know follow my Twitter feed – but hey, sometimes I go to their feed and decided to follow it in return. Anyway, a few weeks back a friend of mine who is not into blogging and all of the social-networking stuff it has spawned sent me this NYT magazine article about the “brave new world of digital intimacy.” I read it, expecting to be irritated and annoyed as I am often am at such articles – usually the authors are severely lacking in the clue department. But this one wasn’t bad, and in fact, the description of the appeal of something like Twitter (which on the surface appears to chronicle trivialities such as “I just had lunch”), really resonated with me. It’s about presence and awareness:
“This is the paradox of ambient awareness. Each little update – each
individual bit of social information – is insignificant on its own, even
supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets
coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends’ and
family members’ lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist
painting.”
I haven’t had time to look at the following links closely yet, but various Twitter-related tools can be found here and here. O’Reilly Radar has also just put out a short report (for a fee) on Twitter and the Micro-Messaging Revolution.
