I first heard about twitter from DeWitt and Sogrady way back in January 2007. But I was super busy at work, and I didn’t get further than twitter.com. Truth be told I was one of the original I don’t get twitter skeptics. But I’ve relented. Reformed. Changed. In the words of Linda Skrocki, I am now in the house.
You can now follow me on twitter. So far, 4 days in, still in my honeymoon period, I like it.
Gut reaction. It’s fun. It makes you feel connected. Sometimes you discover things early, and you get that feeling of being “in the know.” You get insight into what people are thinking about, or doing. You feel closer to people, because you know what they’re up to.
Deja vu. Does it make anyone else feel like you’re passing notes in school? It does for me. Except in this case, the whole class does get to read the note, if you allow your tweets to be public.
Challenge.Writing meaningful thoughts in 140 characters or less can be hard. But it’s good exercise. We could all do with a little encouragement to “get to the point” now and then.
Insecurities. I think you need a healthy ego to publicly post what you are thinking or doing. I can see many people wondering: why would anyone care? I mean, seriously, who the heck cares that I watched the documentary Helvetica last night, using Netflix “Watch Instantly” on my Macbook? But I twittered it anyway, just in case. Maybe my followers didn’t know that the beta for Netflix’s Watch Instantly feature is now open for the Mac, and might just want to give it a try.
So why was I a skeptic?
I thought it might be a time waster, and that the time spent wouldn’t be offset by the type of value found in blogging, because the tweets would be so crippled by their brevity. But it turns out that because tweets are short and easy, important thoughts land on your radar screen even earlier. The corresponding blog posts take longer to write, and sometimes they don’t ever see the light of day. Of course, you can waste time with twitter. But that would be your choice, wouldn’t it? 
I thought the signal to noise ratio would be overwhelming, especially as the service grew beyond the early-adopter elite. But since you control who you follow, and what you pay attention to, signal-to-noise is in your control.
All I heard was “micro-blogging”, which is a really bad term, because it makes twitter sound like it is less than blogging. But in fact it’s about sharing ideas or thoughts that aren’t yet ready to be blogged, and sharing details about our day-to-day that don’t go into most blogs, like “Hey, I voted!” People care about the little things their friends do, and the still-forming ideas that their colleagues are thinking about, and the hot-off-the-press updates that haven’t yet made it to blogs or the news. I think I learned this first via Facebook status updates, which are akin to tweets, albeit confined to the Facebook sandbox.
Twitter is also about convenience. Most people don’t have time to read a bizillion blog posts every day. But tweets? Those are much easier to digest. At the end of the day, we’re all human, and we crave connection, and we care about what our friends are doing more than is sometimes apparent in our busy day-to-day. Not to mention that we’re curious creatures, too.
I’m sure I’ll share my evolving perceptions on twitter—along with a few thoughts on how the homepage can be improved to help the I don’t get twitter folks. More later.
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