Why I love twitter

Tim O'Reilly posted a great summation of why twitter is so great, and it prompted me to extend and interpret why it's grown on me so much recently. <!--more--> Like Tim and so many others, I didn't "get" twitter straight away. In fact, when I joined, I posted a couple of times then went on hiatus for a few months. I don't remember what it was that made me go back, but I do remember updating my Facebook status multiple times a day, to the point where I started treating it like a micro-blog. Once the term "micro-blog" occurred to me, I remembered about twitter and logged back in.

Like so many services on the web, it's not just the service itself that makes it so great, but all the support from its users, creating communities, extending it, mashing it up and generally keeping it fresh and interesting. Now personally, I don't need all these services, but when they show up in Google Reader, I compulsively check them out. They're a great way to find random people you'd never normally follow, and they can be a creative way to display data from specific interesting sources.

The thing with twitter, is that you can't really explain it in a nutshell; ironically, you totally couldn't do it justice in 140 characters. When people ask me what it is, I normally tell them that if they don't know, there really isn't any point explaining it. When they invariably take offence, I placate them with the simple "it's like the Facebook status updates thing, without the rest of Facebook" explanation and it always works. I think that this must be because most people barely care to use Facebook - why would they use a website that provided a tiny amount of functionality available in a more-widely-adopted site that all their friends use? Honestly, why wouldn't they? No-one really has time to spend on social sites, and twitter's simplicity means you don't have to.

Ask any of your non-nerdy friends why they use Facebook and it'll be "it's so easy to keep up with what my friends are doing". Twitter is even easier. It's platform independent; working perfectly on the client side, the web and mobile devices. It's quick; short, pertinent updates make it a great light read without wasting too much of your day (it's not like Wikipedia or Youtube - as much as I love those sites, I never waste whole days following links - it doesn't try to self-perpetuate).

Another great reason that Tim cites for twitter is the unique relationships you form with your contacts. You can follow someone, receive their updates and it's the same type of bitesized interaction you have with your favourite blogger. If you follow someone and they follow you back (my favourite), if it's a real person, it's the equivalent of striking up a conversation with a stranger - the reciprocity is rewarding and the staggered nature of communication adds to the convenience. It's not like Myspace, where you're friends with someone because they're a friend++, and it's not like Facebook where it's someone you met once and don't care about anymore but it's friend++, you follow back because they're interesting in some way and this adds value to the interaction.

There are some things, however, that I dislike about twitter and it seems to be the fault of one of the clients, twhirl. I've never liked the idea of twitter as a marketing tool, and the concept of re-tweeting is something that I don't think I get. Retweets are confusing to read, and sometimes seem to represent a you-scratch-my-back-I'll-scratch-yours approach to sharing on twitter.

I think my dislike of retweeting stems from a deep-seeded opinion I hold of a certain type of blogging I call "via-blogging". Via-blogging is basically posting a quote from an interesting article and linking to the article. It serves no purpose other than to share a link and is an approach that I first noticed on Lifehacker. It can be counter-productive in that you have to read a random excerpt in order to decide whether you want to read the article. You then invariably end up re-reading the passage you already read. Pointless. The format of twitter fits via-blogging perfectly in that you can post a link and a short note of interest, but retweeting gives irrelevant credit to the source and a sometimes irrelevant reaction from the retweeter. Even if the reaction is relevant, the poster doesn't have enough space to make it worthwhile! I sometimes post links on twitter but the place I found it gets no credit, the only accompaniment is a reason for sharing. There's no need for anything else, in my opinion.

It's fairly obvious that the beauty and complexity of twitter stems from its simplicity. It's so unobtrusive, that there are so many ways to interpret it and use it. It can be used to update your status, manage projects, share links, brain dump, learn, form/grow relationships and promote just about anything.

And there you have it. The way that twitter has plugged itself into my life, coupled with all the other irrelevance and bitesized distraction is why I love twitter and would recommend that anyone give it a try and see if it works for you. I bet it will.