OK, I’m taking the plunge. Follow me on Twitter, especially if you want to keep up with this blog (and don’t want to subscribe).
If you haven’t heard of Twitter, it’s a “micro-blogging” (or “life-streaming”) service that allows you to post mini-updates about your current state of being. It has a variety of uses–from simply telling your friends where you’re at, to informing the world that you have a new blog post, to reporting news and current events. This flexibility is the result of its simplicity: posts have to be short and sweet, and the more abbreviations (lol, afk, .02, asaygt, awgthtgtta) the better, and you can post from anywhere (email, internet, cell-phone, etc.), and because it’s all so easy people post enormous amounts of material (which is both an advantage and a disadvantage).
Using twitter is easy. You simply create a (free) account, and then update at will (you can use any one of a number of twitter clients to make this easier, and plugins are available for almost every platform imaginable (from email clients to other social platforms such as Facebook, MySpace, and FriendFeed). Once you are set up and “tweeting” you can start following other Twitter-ers, and they start following you. It’s less headache than blogging, less social than Facebook/MySpace, but it lets you keep others easily and instantly informed about what you’re up to on your blog, at your work, and in your life.
To be honest, I resisted Twitter for awhile, especially because of a slew of problems they have had recently. But those problems have recently been fixed, and so I’m taking the plunge. Time will tell if its useful. In the mean time, I need the followers!.
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I have to tell you, I’m reticent to follow you with the Twitter thing. From what I’ve seen, it just looks like a glorified version of the Facebook status update, and I don’t really want to add another program to perform a mildly useful task that another program is already doing fairly well. Change my mind.
Yes, the social site thing can get overwhelming. But Twitter is the reverse of a glorified facebook; facebook is the SUV, twitter is the Smart Car.
But everyone already uses Facebook, so if I want to share my status update with my friends, I’ll have to try to lure them all over with me. I just don’t get why a program that only does status updates is so great. But obviously others are seeing something that I’m missing, given its growing popularity.