I’m reading all the love notes to and diatribes against Twitter.
Slow down, people! Some people, including me, think maybe you’re all taking this way too seriously.
Maybe (and likely) I’m not typical because I’m not in the industry (whatever that may mean.) I’m just a blogger who blogs for fun. Twitter is just another fun way to blog for me. I throw my twitters out there and if they get read, yay me. I add them to my blog’s sidebar just the way I add my flickr photos. I don’t really see a difference.
I suppose the power players are all up in arms about the usefulness of Twitter. Could it be a tool that businesses can use to improve communication? Could it be a colossal waste of time and cut down on productivity? I guess these are legitimate concerns, but they’re not my concerns.
It points out the myopic view of some major players. If it doesn’t work for ME then it’s useless and I predict its demise.
Twitter has only been around for a few months. It’s only exploded (and exploded is relative in the era of YouTube) in the past few weeks. Look at the mashup app Twittermap. Punch in your location and look at how many people have used Twitter in the past hour or so. I count 15 in Manhattan, less than 20 in Seattle, and maybe 30 in San Francisco. Granted, it’s early on a Saturday, and I have no idea how accurate Twittermap is, it relies on users adding their physical locations to their profiles. But watch the Twitter public timeline and you’ll see the same people over and over (well, if you have enough time to watch for a few hours, anyway!) I don’t know what Twitter’s usage numbers are, but obviously it’s got a long way to go before anyone can tell if it’s going to be a hit or a miss.
Meanwhile, it’s a fun little app, even for someone like me with few followers, using it as a microblog. Read through that public timeline for awhile (hint- let it sit there and update for 15 minutes or so to see more than 10 updates.) I would hazard a guess that most of those people are more like me- not really talking to friends, just talking to whoever might be out there listening. It’s fun, it’s interesting. It’s certainly potentially very useful.
Instead of proclaiming it dead, or the Next Big Thing, why not just watch and see where it goes?
