Why I Love Twitter (and will for at least another month)

Photo by iJustine, via flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ijustine/

OK, after a couple of weeks playing with it, I love Twitter. I find it much more yummy than I ever found Myspace, or Facebook (which should be odd, because Twitter is very, very limited in comparison.)

But Twitter gives me a very pure form of that thing I liked most about Facebook (with their status updates): A sense of low-level telepathy. I have a vague idea of what a lot of my friends, and other people I like, are feeling. How their life is going. People who really like Twitter tweet far more often than they update their Facebook status, so the knowledge of how they are doing is more granular, more finegrained. With Facebook I know they're happier, or sadder, this week than last week. With Twitter, I know they're happier, or sadder, this evening than they were this morning.

And the blurring of the line between friend and famous person is democratic and interesting.

Plus, I've never seen a social/internet thingy evolve so fast. It's fascinating.

Does this mean Twitter will change the world/hit a billion users/be around in a year's time? Not necessarily. It's evolving fast in an ecosystem which is also evolving fast. Spam risks ruining it. And every other tech company wants to buy it/kill it/replace it. Anything could happen.  But it's the closest thing yet to the simple, non-technical, magic app that will bring the internet right into our head, so that we can talk to anyone about anything in any language, to solve any problem at any time, so that we will never be lonely again.

This version of Twitter is going to look primitive as fuck within a year. But you, me, it, and the world will be very different in a year. Right now, it's the place to play. (Which has distracted me terribly from my blog, sorry. I've posted something like 89 tweets in the past fortnight, and one blog post.)

Anyway, if you are Twittering, or thinking you might try it, call round and see me sometime.

Comments

[Stan]

"the blurring of the line between friend and famous person is democratic and interesting"

Indeed. I wasn't on Twitter when Stephen Fry got stuck in a lift, but that - along with a few other incidents - became infamous so quickly and so widely that I became increasingly intrigued. Twitter's ability to transmit bite-sized information rapidly and globally could have (and is arguably already having)* a significant effect on politics, journalism, pop culture, etc. And the character limit encourages a haiku-like creativity. Sometimes.

* Sorry about this horrible construction.

I was initially put off Twitter by the idea of it being just another trendy social networking site with added celebs (i.e. before I really looked at it), but its simplicity lends it great versatility. It's easy to filter out most of the undesirable noise, and even tweets about mundane activity can be wonderful. Though as you say, spam may ruin it yet. Not to mention viruses: mere hours after joining, my account was hijacked and I appeared to be someone else for a few days.

But with a bit of luck and good organisation it will stay interesting for a while yet. No one knows quite where it's all going. I'm no singularitarian, but Pierre Teilhard de Chardin would have been tickled pink by it.

[Julian Gough]

Stan the man, yes, it's interesting, everybody seems to dismiss it in the same way, until they try it. Then, 80% of them quickly and helplessly fall in love. It's close to being the most infuriatingly loveable app yet (and only 20% of that can be attributed to Stephen Fry).

I agree with you that it's significantly affecting politics, journalism, pop culture. Its strength, I think, is that it reinforces/runs parallel to the strongest hardwired aspects of human nature: the need to build and reinforce small social groups (we can only handle small-village sized numbers of friends in meaningful ways: upper limit is very roughly 250). Twitter does that, but allows a vast hinterland of others to drift in and out of that magic group. It's a village with very fluid boundaries.

Enough for now! Must get back to my screenplay. But boy am I enjoying thinking about this. Thanks Stan...

[Stan]

"only 20% of that can be attributed to Stephen Fry"

Ha!

I like your description of it as a village with very fluid boundaries. It is not dissimilar to other descriptions I've heard, which tend to be based on parks, cafes and other accessible, pleasant, small-scale arenas. But with built-in globalness. If you've not seen it, you might enjoy this paper on retweeting: http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2009/06/18/understanding_r.html.

And yes, Dunbar's number is bound to pop up in a discussion such as this. Little wonder there are so many sites dedicated to "twibes".