4 posts tagged “twitter”
Twitter is what I hoped it would be: a way to stay in touch with friends. The way I use it has continued to evolve. Here are some notes.
I made my timeline public. It means I've moved away from the idea of Twitter as a backchannel for activities like work, but I was never able to get traction with that idea. In truth, I consider everything on the Internet public anyway, so simply marking a timeline private wasn't sufficient for me to tweet freely.
My public timeline complements my personal blog. If people want to know who I am, they can follow me or read my timeline to get a better picture. Maybe I'm setting the example: I wish I could learn more about the job candidates I'm phone screening and interviewing. I assume they want to know about me, too.
I'm using text messaging to receive tweets when I am out of the office in the evening and on weekends. I can't overstate how this changes the Twitter experience. With a 140-character tweet you get to know how that person's weekend is going, and you learn about it when you're out doing stuff too. It's a great way to stay connected to people when you're not camped in front of the computer. You should at least experiement with it and see what you think. It's also convinced me there is at least one more major breakthrough in social network applications coming once the right mobile platform arrives to enable it.
I've been experimenting with Pownce for the last few months and have decided it's not going to work for me. I've got a blog, and I've got Twitter. I thought there was a gap between the two that Pownce could fill nicely, but I was wrong. I think most of what I have to say is either concise enough to fit in 140 characters or has enough meat to justify a real blog post. So I've stopped using Pownce.
Nate challenged me and suggested that the problem could be that the Pownce client is lame or that Pownce doesn't have the hip community that Twitter has. He's right on both points. Twitter is dirt-simple, and desktop clients take advantage of that. The desktop client for Pownce by comparison is cumbersome and not fun. As for community, just look at my favorites to see I get a lot of laughs from the crowd I follow.
That said, I'm still following friends who have Pownce accounts. None of them have full-blown blogs, and Pownce seems pretty useful for those who don't want to deal with a blog. Microblogging has more potential and is more intimate.
After months and months I still find it hard to explain why Twitter is cool. This video does a pretty good job, though.
I disabled public access to my Twitter updates. I've bitten hard on using Twitter as a back channel, and I would like to be more free with updates. I can't do that as long as my updates are public. The update "Gave Kuehl the Rundown." is an abbreviation of a much more pithy update that I didn't feel right posting to the 'Net at large.
So sign up if you want to give it a whirl. I consider Twitter accounts as disposable as IM and email accounts, so definitely gin a phony if you like and send it to me.
For Windows, twitteroo seems pretty nice.
Update: twitteroo sucks.
Last Spring I said Twitter was pointless, but I am revisiting that conclusion. Raph Koster observed that it was good for tracking the fires around his house, and Guy Kawasaki is convinced it's fun and useful. I signed up for an account and started following Major Nelson.
Lo and behold, it's kind of fun. Do you remember your .plan on your school's Unix machine? Do you remember updating your .plan and reading other peoples' .plans? Even .plans of people at other schools? It feels the same way, and my brain is drifting towards the off-the-wall comments we used to make in .plans. Should I restrict all updates to haiku for a day? Should I weave signs of the upcoming apocolypse (zombies, of course) into my updates?
But what happens if people I know start using it? I just started following Wil Shipley. His use of Twitter is quite different. It feels more like a long-running open chat between him and some friend using Twitter's @username sprinkled with random comments that may turn into more threads. It feels like a group chat that is "more" asynchronous than IM and being Twitter, actually portable. Ideally, it's the back-channel of real life.
This has got me thinking about managing relationships with other people. I have two real problems.
- My brother lives in Texas. I'm in Indiana. Visits are expensive. The telephone is expensive. Time is marching on.
- My friends from work don't live close to me, so anything outside of work has to be planned. I've got a family that is a priority and requires flexibility. I don't get to hang out as much as I would like. What can be done to fill in the gaps?
The second problem is relatively new. The kids are getting old enough that they don't demand my full attention 24/7. I can actually have a life with Michelle and others. What is that going to look like for the next ten years until both kids are in college? Michelle and I aren't empty nesters, i.e., completely free, but I feel like I can maintain some friendships outside of the house. If some technology can help, all the better.
The first problem is spectaculary frustrating to me. I've got a niece and nephew that are growing up. I don't know them. I've got a lot I can learn about life from my brother, and I know he can learn from me. We just have no chance to be brothers with the time and money constraints.
I saw a comment the other day that the "over-50 crowd" was invading social networks. (I laughed when the actual demographic was like 32-53.) Makes sense. The primary use case for social networks so far has been "how is this going to get me laid?" Maybe it's time to start thinking about more important use cases like "how is this going to keep my family closer?" or "How is this going to provide stress release after swinging axes at work?"
Let me know if you sign up.
Update: I plan on updating every time I give somebody the rundown. What if we all did that?
Update: Twitterific rocks.
