So I have signed up with the latest gimmick, Twitter. I'm trying to see if I can get any use out of it but it's early yet.
Anybody else tried this 140-character limited ... thing? I first saw it mentioned in an "Over The Hedge" comic--which may also be where I first heard of rickrolling--and now I'm seeing it mentioned in other places.
It seems to be like chat, in that you talk about what's going on with you in 140 characters or less. It's less work and more free associative than blogging.
I dunno. Is anybody else using it? Having fun with it? Tried it and gave it up?
A blogger I follow twittered the conventions and I frikkin hated it. It was so awkward and weird and I kept thinking there was more to the sentence when I clicked on the timestamp link. There wasn't.
I went with the thread title because when I signed up, the service congratulated me upon becoming a "twitterer". Ugh. I think "twit" makes more sense.
It could probably be useful if you wanted to keep up with a specific set of people, who were constantly online, and had nothing else to talk about except "what are you doing?"
It's kind of useful the way text messaging is useful, only less. With text messaging, you get right to the point without having to go through the whole making conversation thing first. With Twitter, you do the conversation gambit with nothing substantial behind it.
At least, that's what I got from their explanatory video.
I tweet on twitter. Mostly I read a couple of my friends' twitter streams. I get them sent to my phone via text messages.
I don't think of them as conversational at all. Mostly, I think of them as continual status-updates. It gives me something to talk about with my friends when I do see them in person. For example, one friend had posted a blurb about her response to a law review article she had read. We talked more about the article and some of the other things that had been going on when we met up in person.
There is an article in the NYTimes about Twitter, etc. this week.
That was an interesting article, wildy. Especially the part where the phenomenon was compared to the days when everybody knew everything about everyone else.
You can update that fast on a blog but it would be more work. (For me, anyway.) Much easier to do the free association thing--I'm a fan of that, has anyone noticed?--with Twitter than with blogging.
Some other one that finds curse words, but I can't remember where that one is.
Anyway, the point is, I love things with open APIs (google maps, facebook, twitter, etc) because I love the shit individual developers find to do with it.