Looking out of the window

The Twitter Brower: flowingdata.com

Obama is on it, so is Ashton Kutcher, Demi Moore, Vanessa Hudgens, Ryan Seacrest, Tina Fey, Robert Pattinson and a lot of other important and less important people.  Who needs paparazzi to tell us what celebs are up to when they can do it themselves in 140 characters or less at that. When Shakespeare said ‘Brevity is the soul of wit’, You know now he was talking about Twitter, the micro-blogging service where you can find people posting updates, networking, promoting, looking for jobs, getting fired from jobs and having fun sometimes. There are even fictional characters like Shawn Spencer from USA’s Psych twittering online.  

I joined Twitter many months ago out of sheer curiosity and then let my account gather dust. It seemed so silly to keep posting updates about what I am doing to a bunch of strangers. But in a vague moment of boredom a few weeks ago, I made a post and pretty soon, I realized I liked it. Now I make an average of three posts a day sometimes two in ten minutes. I think for the first time, I would stick to a social networking site after the initial enthusiasm wears off. 

My past experiences with the social networking scene have not impressed me to the degree, where I could think of it the way a lot of journalists do. Orkut was fun till it got mildly creepy with pretty much anyone and everyone wanting to be your friend for no visible reason. The ‘frandship’ requests alone were enough for me to renounce my account with little regret. Plus I’d found Facebook by then and it seemed like a classier and more private alternative to being on Orkut. But then it became so over loaded with features, that you dreaded logging in, lest someone had challenged you to  some inane game  or quiz that didn’t make sense to begin with. It’s become the legitimate spam portal where anyone can push anything into your face.  The only reason I am still on it is because I love my friends and I have to find some way of keeping in touch with them.  Plus it’s sort of uncool not to be on it, even if I check my account like say once in three months.

Twitter is like the ultimate no frills Facebook. It is less complex, more creative and definitely cooler.  It’s fun to think of the mundane daily activities in the form of witty, staccato sentences, and I think that’s really what people enjoy a lot more than the connectivity. Co-founder of Twitter, Biz Stone was on The Colbert Report the other night, and he said “Twitter is like the messaging service, we didn’t know we needed.”  I have to agree, since it is exactly the kind of messaging service I’ve been looking for. Free, fast and done through a key board.

More than the technical features of Twitter, it is the social dynamic which is more interesting.  Why do we take so much trouble to worry about our privacy and then write about what time we got up or where we’re gonna go for dinner? It’s almost like most of the time; we’re trying to make our lives appear more interesting than it actually is or just making a performance out of things, because there is a hypothetical audience out there for it, reading about us. 

It’s probably the reason why there are so many celebrities on Twitter, after years of telling the media to leave them alone that too. Biz Stone says its because Twitter is a simple and quick way of controlling information about yourself and that’s why it attracts so much Hollywood traffic. Plus it also acts like an improvisation of word-of mouth in a way, allowing you to promote stuff as well and create a closer bond with the fans.  My Space and Blogs require a different kind of structure of information and moderation which they may not have the time or inclination for.

Micro blogging has been around for some time now and Twitter takes it to a whole new level by bridging it with cell phone activity and that’s probably appealing to a lot of users, given the number of special applications cell phones have come up with to facilitate Twitter on cell phones.  Android came up with Twitteroid. Adobe has come up with TweetDeck to bridge Twitter with Facebook, a web application that I am trying out right now and liking.

I don’t know whether to get too excited about it all, because a lot of good things on the web have taken a turn for the worse, simply because they became too popular for their own good. I hope the same doesn’t happen with Twitter.