Twitter has always seemed like one part silliness and two parts vanity. I’ve just never seen the value in it (I blame my advanced age). However, I’ve been more inclined to jump in as a listener of late. I don’t know what changed. Maybe my multitasking capabilities have just improved enough to add yet another signal into the comm channel. Maybe I’m just becoming a wannabe 30 something hipster. Anyways, I finally took the plunge last Friday night and quickly reeled in my first high value tweet from coworker / friend Betsy Weber who noted that, “Community Server used Jing to make screencast demos at their Hack-A-Thon event.”
Now, its possible at some point in the future I would have received an internal email from Betsy with this link, but timing is everything. I would not have written this post if I had not received the message when I did and had a bit of personal time to write (yep, I call midnight to 3 am ‘personal time’). The point is that it looks like Twitter can be a sort of early warning filter as well as a place for social banter, networking, etc.
Were there other reasons for my caving? I’ve noticed that some of the people I’ve listened to inside the Adobe channel are much more active inside of Twitter and this activity has been sustained.
Then there was the bomb shell from JD that he was thinking of abandoning blogging for Twitter. I’m actually pretty discouraged by this given his importance to the community as a voice, listener and filtered aggregator. I don’t believe the short form microblogging Twitter offers up or the awkward access to historical posts is an ideal narrative, but I guess I need to just get over it and roll with change.
6 Comments
I see Twitter as a great filter for people. Instead of blogging things that aren’t worth the time you quickly spread it out to your friends and those who actually care about the small things. Leave the blog for the real content sort of thing.
Thwirl really helps twitter become part of my everyday life.. without it I don’t think I would have been this active.
wow, I’m famous… and my typo too!
@Phillip Indeed–I’m a star maker. ;-)
So do you have a twitter ID that I can follow?
@Tom babarakus is my twitter handle.
Whoops, sorry for the delay, and the concern. (And thanks for the kind words too.)
I don’t think I’ll be abandoning a weblog (although the immolation of weblogs.macromedia.com did make the point moot for awhile). A few years ago I was ten posts a day, as a news service… dropped down to maybe ten a week as more people filtered news… now I can fit links and short commentary into 140 characters.
In a perfect world, just publishing information once would be enough. But that isn’t the way weblogs really work — even getting comments to appear is a crapshoot these days — and I’m not tempermentally suited to shouting over the din. Not sure how to handle it yet….
jd