My new favorite Twitter quote:
Whenever I call my friends, family, or girlfriend (basically, people in my life who I care about), I often ask them, “what are you doing?” or maybe, “what’s going on?” or “what’s new?” In the grand scheme of things though, does it really matter, or directly affect my life in any way? Most of the time, no. Could I still go on with my life if I never knew what they were doing? Probably. So then, why do I still ask?
I think it just boils down to idle curiosity. These are people you care about. And, I don’t know why, but for some reason, the more you care about someone, the more you want to know how their lives are going and what they’re doing with it. But instead of asking, “how’s your life going?” (that just comes off as a little weird and too profound), we usually simplify it and might ask, “what’s going on?”
Now, Twitter enters the picture. Instead of us having to call them and ask, “what’s up?” just because we happen to be thinking about them at that moment, they can just tell us without us having to call them and ask. Does that mean I never call them now just because they have Twitter? Of course not. The way I see it, it’s just another medium for communication, and what’s wrong with that?
As for the useless tweets like, “omg, there’s corn in my shit!!!” or “i’m soooooo hot right now!!”, that seems to be more of a teenage phenomenon. For those who don’t understand Twitter’s appeal, I think they just want to be heard and be accepted. If they can accomplish that through Twitter and it makes them happy, then, hey, I’m all for it.
That’s only half the story. Speaking about Facebook here, my experience is that people hook up because they want to see what the fuss is about and get in touch with people. Then they see all the silly stuff and a good deal of them go crazy on it for a while, THEN they get sick of all that and just use it to keep in touch with people.
The point made up-thread about it being like conversations is a good one too. The kind of inane stuff people post seems utterly pointless to strangers, but to the poster’s best friends and family, it’s interesting. If a friend of mine was taking their dog to get his anal glands squeezed, I WOULD be interested. Because we have to do that with our dog too, and it can be messy and smelly.
Most people in the world don’t care that my wife got up late after a good night’s sleep, the kids slept through the night, and they were good getting dropped off at daycare and now she’s doing the shopping, and then she’s doing some housework. But all that useless information is exactly the type of thing we’d talk about on the phone. “What did you do today?” “Did the kids sleep through?” “How did daycare go?” So those status updates are valuable information for me and maybe a handful of other friends who are close enough to care, and we are the targets of those particular status updates. At other times the status updates may not interest me in the least, but she has other friends commenting on them.
If you consider them to be snippets of conversation and reflect on how inane most conversations are to people who are not involved, you’ll recognise that it’s just a different media for the same thing, social interaction with friends. And you should also recognise that 99% of ALL social interaction seems utterly pointless and empty to someone not a party to it.
Status update: 1920s SDR is a little jealous that many of his NZ friends’ status updates say one word, “skiing.”
I haven’t read the thread, so I don’t know if anyone else has mentioned this, but I think Twitter really only works if celebrities/athletes/people with interesting information are posting updates and everyone else is just following. If you’re not one of those people, then nobody cares about what you’re thinking or what mundane tasks you’re performing at a given moment.
I only skimmed through the thread, but let me offer my experience.
My girlfriend makes and sells hemp jewelry online, since she started using Twitter her sales have nearly doubled.
Her sister, an independent musician, has increased her fanbase significantly. She credits Twitter as a significant factor in the success of her new album.
As far me…I’m a political news junkie who finds enough interesting links through Twitter to warrant the few minutes a day I spend on it.
It’s not this useful for everyone, but people who only see a glorified facebook status update are seriously overlooking the functionality of the thing.
Cocaine dealers must be cleaning up…
I don’t understand the allure of Twitter. Google is more useful than Twitter. For all the people following Twitter, you should try this site.
Resurrecting an old thread because I finally ‘got’ Twitter. I agree with a lot of the posts that if you’re just following friends who post mundane things about their life, that’s useless and boring (and I’ll see it on Facebook if you do that, which I use for friends). I use my twitter account for photography, and the people I follow (and those, for the most part, who are following me so far) are other photographers. It’s a wonderful place to get daily tips or inspiration from some really excellent photographers. I can also share my photos and experiences…sort of like a quick look online photography seminar that’s free. I really like it so far.
But yeah, mundane status updates? Not interested. Tweet every 45 seconds? Consider you unfollowed. Provide useful information and insights? Heck yeah.
Atta boy!
Also, Bill Gates just joined Twitter this week. It’s very interesting watching him become accustomed to it. Also fascinating is seeing who he follows. Dozens of foundations and global non-profits for the philanthropy. A number of political feeds, and a bunch of scientific feeds. And then Aston Kutcher, Ryan Seacrest and someone named Ashley Tisdale for the pop culture.
It’s sort of big on the blogosphere–a lot of people use it to promote their blogs. That’s why I do it–I tweet when I put up a new blog post. Oh, and I follow celebs and tweet about my new pies. 
So you have a mini-blog that tells people when you’re blogging? How meta.
Well, some people just follow blogs through twitter as opposed to just following it on blogger or in their blog roll, I suppose. So if you want to know if someone’s got a blog post up, twitter tells you. I just started on Twitter a little over a month ago and the bulk of my followers seem to be blog people because that’s pretty much the only place where I advertise my twitter account.
Can I sit next to you? Because I have no fucking clue either. Does it require a cell phone? I don’t have one of those, because anyone who wants to contact me usually knows exactly where I am.