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.