Twitter: first look
According to their front page,
Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co-workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?
Kind of sad, but I don’t have that many fiends, errr, friends, but I’ve still taken to Twitter as there are lot’s of uses for it, beyond building up a network of friends and effectively reading someones else’s diary, which I suspect is the true value of Twitter.
For a start, it’s a handy to-do list for myself. Whilst I very much dislike Vista for myself I did love the clock and ‘Post-it notes’ bar to the right of the screen. You can largely replicate this with Google widgets, but that puts more junk on your system that I am comfortable with. Still, this great for me as, when I’m not playing RPG games, I’m working on my website(s) and I can use it as a constant reminder to ‘put to the pizza in at 3’ or ‘Note to self: Hospital at 11:30’
Needless to say I have memory problems and all the prompts help!
The other side to Twitter and the constant if generally trivial entries is motivational, strangely enough. Not so long ago any of my Twitter entries – and a million addicts like me – would have read like this:
- 8am, kids off to school. Logging onto WoW.
- 4pm cooking teas
- 4.30pm back on WoW
- 2am Logged off Warcraft, off to bed.
In its own way it can make you focus on your life, and on bad habits.
The other good thing about Twitter and probably its main popularity is it correctly fills a niche is the market that many were using blogs (badly) for. No-one really wants to read a vacuous blog where a person is going about their daily duties. An equally empty Twitter, with its clean interface and small footprint entries are another matter altogether, I find
Go Twitter!