What is Twitter? The New York Times calls it “one of the fastest-growing phenomena on the Internet.” Time Magazine says, “Twitter is on its way to becoming the next killer app.” And Newsweek wrote that “Suddenly, it seems as though all the world’s a-twitter.”
Twitter is like the text messaging of your cell phone adapted to your personal computer. While you’re sitting at work or playing Duke Nukem vs. The Sims, you can fire off a note to any and all of the folks on your friends list. Tweat is the new verb for creating the note, and a tweater is the individual who writes it, an individual who may or may not be what the Brits call a twit.
Like most technology of the post-modern era, Twitter is good, bad and ugly. It’s what the smart set do, and it can be pretty silly. But it builds community and forces people to articulate themselves concisely because you can use no more than 140 words per message. When you tweat, you get to use all your fingers, as opposed to clumsy-thumbing on a cell, and you can see what you’re doing on a big screen.
A heavyweight named Michael Hyatt, the CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishing, would seem to be a mainstream sort of guy. His passionate blog post, “12 Reasons to Start Twittering” lays out the advantage of Twitter and is a must read for anyone interested in starting to tweat.
I have received 483 invites to be a Twitter friend. Until now, that’s more than all the friends I’ve made in a lifetime. I generally stand by my friends, so I tilt toward seeing the advantages posted by the CEO of the world’s biggest Christian publishing house.
But nothing is perfect. In the last month I began following three dozen randomly selected Twitter posts. Here are the highlights:
1. The majority of people let you know when they’re going to bed.
2. The weather where they are is worthy of note. I especially appreciate knowing the barometric pressure for the last 24 hours!
3. Runners tell you how far they ran and their time.
4. Many Twitter users are Sci Fi junkies and comic book readers and love to share thoughts on Dr. Who, Battlestar Galactica, and Spawn.
5. There are Lost fans in Twitterdom. They do not…repeat not…want any spoilers revealed.
6. Three people shared that they were going to the bathroom while tweating. One was doing #1 and two #2, in case you are keeping tabs.
7. One person tweated, “There’s a tone deaf, rhythmically challenged senior saint four rows in front of me. Father forgive me for letting his singing bother me,” while he was in church.
8. One guy tweated 27 times in one hour.
9. Large percentages tweat from work. Most do not like their jobs. One refers to his “f’ing boss” and employer by name.
10. One person said he and someone else were “making whoopee.” (Film to follow?)
11. A church recently held a Twitter service and found the results positive.
12. I now know the intimate details of the comings and goings of many folks, their friends and families. The particulars that people are putting out on Twitter are the same details that kidnapers, robbers, or stalkers would kill to know.
The above makes me wonder as Thoreau did regarding the new messaging breakthrough of his day: “We are in great haste to build a magnetic telegraph from Main to Texas; but Main and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.”
On the positive side, over time you can see young Tweaters improve their writing. Some writing is better than none, and the constraints imposed by Twitter force them to get to the point of what little is on their mind.
As for me, the little on my mind that may be distilled in under 140 characters can be found at www.twitter.com/toddalbertson.
Back when I was working for Microsoft, we loved to evangelize the folks who were the “innovators of technology.” These are the individuals who were very eager to try new ideas and new technology. They were less concerned about the downside of what happens if something goes wrong, than they were about experiencing the cutting-edge.
