It was a hot afternoon. I was finishing up a long day at work, thinking of what to make of the evening ahead of me. Get drinks with co-workers? A bike ride? Dinner with my wife? Nope, even better. I joined Twitter! My fist tweet, like many others, was quite profound. At 5:37pm on July 19th, 2008 I valiantly tweeted, “finally gave in to Twitter.” It’s a difficult note to follow. What else could I say to follow that?
Strangely, Twitter has come up in every conversation I’ve had this week, and on several occasions, I’ve heard someone describing it to their friends as I’ve passed bye. I’ve enjoyed hearing people stumble through the silly new lexicon that surrounds Twitter. And, oh, how excited they are to be the person to enlighten their friends on this “big new thing!” (Soon to be 2 years old, Twitter is not that new.) They explain to their friends what they use it for. “I try to keep all of my tweets-” “Tweets?” “Yeah, your little twitters are called tweets. I try to keep all of my tweets about politics, but I throw things like what I’m having for dinner or, like the book I’m reading. It’s fun!”
At the time of writing, I’ve tweeted 1,253 more original notes under 140 characters, and have a whopping 115 people excited to read them. I’m kind of kidding, but really, I think people are taking it all way too seriously. We’ve become overly concerned with the number of “followers,” and we’ve started tracking who stops following us and when. Applications like Qwitter notify you when someone quits following you, and it reports it as if your last tweet was just so offensive that someone couldn’t take any more of it. This is a preposterous and unhealthy assumption, and paying attention to who stops following you is a useless waste of time and emotion.
What’s going to kill Twitter, then?
As much as I enjoy it, and as much as it has probably brought me a bit of exposure, it is being abused. It’s becoming more of a strategy and less organic. Soon it could be too much for anyone to get excited about, and it will cause terrible migraines like those of Maximillian Cohen’s in the movie Pi. As it’s used to leverage services and products of countless companies, and becomes less and less personal we will distance ourselves from it more and more. It will get louder and louder and louder until we just close our laptops and walk away.
I’ll be fine if it comes to that. Seeing people struggle over whether or not they should be personal or professional on Twitter can be down right painful to watch. If you feel uncomfortable with the application, then maybe it would be better if you didn’t use it. Certainly don’t try selling me on something through it! Your facade is transparent. People will know if you are using it just to leverage your business. Authenticity (or the lack thereof) shines through, even in 140 characters.
And what is it that we will do then?
If Twitter gets thrown in the closet with our stonewashed jeans will we just create a new online application or have that dinner with the one we love? I’ll choose the latter, because let’s face it, it takes little time to write a quip that is less than 140 characters, but keeping up with all that’s out there is a black hole. One that I am enjoying right now, but am skeptical of it’s lasting qualities if authenticity isn’t prominent.
I’m not the pessimist you think I am, really.
Now that I’ve said all of that, come follow me on Twitter. This is more of a call to save Twitter than a call for it’s demise, and I try to keep things pretty interesting. My usual topics on Twitter loosely revolve around my interests which are design, collage, typography, food, and the little adventures my wife and I go on. Good times!
Arguments and opinions are welcome below.
11 Comments
in my opinion, every service has these kind of ‘issues’. i tend to tell people how twitter works, but i don’t try to convince them to join because most of the time they’ve just barely gotten comfortable with myspace and facebook. Also, it’s very much a cult thing to me. i can tell you now that most of my friends will feel uncomfortable and won’t try or can’t express themselves on twitter. i see twitter as a medium, like chatting or a blog even, only more public (it’s up to you to choose how public you want to be). Everyone can find out how they should use twitter, and sometimes, yes, this can be frustrating and uncomfortable to see. I think twitter is still ‘young’ in the sense that people don’t really know what it is, or what to do with it. Stephen fry is the reason why alot of people join. Indeed there are litterally loads and loads of bullshit twitter accounts(not stephen fry), but it’s up to us to not follow or let them follow us, because those accounts are not what twitter is all about, or at least not to me. When i see my myspace inbox getting flooded with spam requests, i don’t think to myself ‘oh well, this is probably the death of myspace’.
Mrtnd, thanks for sharing your thoughts. You’re right, every service has these kinds of issues, but just how long can we keep it up? As I said, I really enjoy Twitter, and I can see its benefits. Case in point, after publishing this post, I tweeted it, and even asked for folks to retweet it.
But the louder it gets, and the more nonsense that fills it will make it more difficult to keep up with. Otherwise, it will have to become something else. Trimming your “following” list will help, but only so much.
Also, Myspace is a whole other problem. I am sure they are feeling the effects of Facebook and Twitter. At least on these FB and Twitter you can avoid the spam.
Right on, Able. I think many people take the whole followers thing way too seriously. I’ve noticed that I’ve gained some followers via what I can only assume is an Twitter search RSS feed for a specific term, like swimming. When I check out their homepage, they are often following sometimes over 1000 people. I cannot imagine how this experience would help me feel connected–seems like overload. I wouldn’t want to fish through pages of total strangers tweeting to other total strangers just to find something relevant to my life.
In my experience, it’s a fine line between participation in a virtual community and overtweetage (OT).
I am an advertising student currently participating in a four month internship. Recently, my employer suggested I sign up for Twitter as there are many interesting and inspiring people on it. He also wanted to show me the scale of social media. I am an avid facebook-a-holic and thought that twitter would be just as easy to discuss my life on. However, this is not the case. Although I have fallen in love with twitter, I find that I use it more for education and resources. I find it hard to continually discuss my day to day activities as I try to keep it professional. In that regard, I find Twitter to be somewhat awkward sometimes as I may sit there for ten minutes contemplating whether or not my ‘followers’ would be the slight bit interested in my sandwich and soda lunch.
However as a resource and an educational tool, I will continue to be a loyal tweeter and hopefully if many others continue, we won’t see an end to twitter anytime soon.
So your basic argument is that Twitter might die because all things die eventually. Oh, and because it’s becoming too big so it’s becoming too corporate.
That’s is deep. And a shockingly original concept to propose about any popular new trend. And definitely worthy of discussion..
*yawn*
@Mrtnd “When i see my myspace inbox getting flooded with spam requests, i don’t think to myself ‘oh well, this is probably the death of myspace’.”
Actually I think this IS the death of MySpace. And once upon a time, Friendster used to be all that too. And while it’s still there, it’s a shadow of it former self.
I think you have a typo in your Twitter bio
@Scott – “In my experience, it’s a fine line between participation in a virtual community and overtweetage (OT).” I agree.
@Charlotte – I’m a little late in replying. If I would have replied on time I might of said something like, “Yes, Facebook and Twitter are very different.” Now I’m not so sure, since FB made some pretty major changes to the interface. Still, it seems to me more of a personal application, depending on who you allow to see your profile. Twitter is great for sharing information, and keeping in loose contact with people. It’s also becoming a better search engine than Google, which is something pretty extraordinary!
@micael – To be clear, I’m not concerned with Twitter becoming “corporate.” I’m concerned that companies and individuals could take the personality out of Twitter. It’s not uncommon that businesses or websites just set up their Twitter account to update when they post to their blog. It’s scripted, and there’s no conversation. That’s not what Twitter is for, that’s what an RSS feed is for. Like I said, I really like Twitter, I just hope it can be as authentic as possible.
@Russell – Thanks for pointing that out. And nice website you’ve got there!
Frankly, I’d rather read a blog that had some thought into it than so and so’s twitter. “Going to Taco Bell”, “Just watched Seinfeld, my soup needs salt”, “peed on my jeans a little” are all excellent literary examples of twitter and why I can’t see why anyone on earth would want to read or write a twit(or tweet).
If I want to know what my friends are up to I’ll call them or go see them. I’ve tried to embrace the twitting phenomenon, but it just seems like a waste of time and effort. If you’re into wasting time, then twitter might just be the thing for you.
Able, I can’t believe you’ve given in! Twitter is the stupidest load of the crap the Intertubes have produced in a long time. Seriously, what is the point?
Pithy little utterances, look at me world, blah blah blah, what a logical progression of the disconnected, uncommitted, e-posturing “social networking” shit we’ve been warned about for years. In all honesty, I dig technology far more than the next guy, but how exactly does Twitter improve the quality of my life and that of my local community? (Exception, the former: Rob Crilly from Sudan post-ICC warrant for al-Bashir)
If you’ve never had dinner with your next door neighbor you should not be allowed on the social web. And churches should be legally prevented from buying smoke machines. But I digress.
Anthony and Chris, I think you’ve both got the wrong idea of what Twitter can be, but I’m not a Twitter evangelist. I don’t want to try to convince you of reasons to use it, although it’s worth pointing out that it is useful. I don’t think it’s improving anyone’s “quality of life,” but is Google?
If you say yes, Google does improve the quality of our lives, because we can find information immediately. Well, with just a quick search on Twitter you can find information as it’s happening. And it’s not “peed on my jeans a little” type of information. If you say, no Google doesn’t improve the quality of our lives, then stop using it. Is that what you are suggesting, Chris? Or am I way off here?
I do agree that churches should be legally prevented from buying smoke machines. Ha! I should have expected you to say that. I know it’s been a while since we’ve seen each other, but I should have guessed you’d bring something like that up. ;)
Hope you are well, man.
Sorry to lump a response to both of you into the same thought, but it seemed to make more sense. Cheers!