I pretty much use Facebook as a birthday reminder service. And I’ve seen people who use Flickr photo pages to blog. It sort of demonstrates that, if you can get it to do what you want it to do, there really isn’t a “wrong” way to use a social media tool.
However, I really didn’t “get” Twitter for a long time. I wasn’t really much of a text messager at that point. Plus, though I wasn’t a super-early adopter, I was still ahead of a lot of my friends, so there weren’t that many people I already knew on Twitter.
I didn’t mind the 140-character limit so much. (If you send a lot of IMs, you know that your writing tends to get short and choppy. Scarily, it tends to carry over to your other writing.)
The thing that put me off most, ironically, was the mobile aspect: I hated getting incessant text messages, about totally inane stuff. Even if I generally care about you, I don’t necessarily care about the random, ephemeral stuff you’re doing (or even if I do, I don’t necessarily need to know it in real time)… especially if it’s delivered in an incredibly interruptive way, such as a beeping and vibrating mobile phone alert.
Coming Around on Chat
It wasn’t until I saw someone at a conference using a Twitter desktop client (Twitterific, in that case; I use Twhirl now), that I realized I was hung up on the mobile stuff, and missing out on Twitter’s other uses. When you use a desktop client, Twitter changes from an annoying, mobile-based microblogging and friend status update platform tool, into:
* A distributed public chat client, where, once you get past the idea that it’s a chat, even though not everyone is in the same “room,” the flow of status updates feels like any other text chat, where you can dip in and out, or scroll back through, as needed.
* A public IM client, where by using @replies, you’re primarily talking to one person, but in a way that other people can see, like a comment.
* A private IM client, where you use Direct Messages to reach someone privately, including on their mobile (where, incidentally, you can get to them without knowing their cell number, or revealing your own.)
Still Not 100% Sold
These days, I’m still not that “good” of a Twitter-er. For starters, I refuse to call posts “tweets,” I’m only following 146 people, and have 180 followers in return. (My twitterrank is 98.08, or 89th percentile, whatever that means). And of the people I follow, I only get mobile updates from a few of them (and of those few, even fewer actually post with any regularity).
As to the rest of it: I’m still something of a Twitter-skeptic — I still think that Twitter users, as a whole, are disproportionately convinced of their disproportionate influence, and I think that the current corporate adoption of Twitter as a customer service channel won’t scale in its current form once more people figure it out.
But I did get more value from Twitter, once I started looking at it as a chat client. It’s another tool for the social media toolbox.
What do you think of Twitter? (Remember, their uptime is much better these days, so you can’t just crack on the fail whale.) How are you using it? Let me know in the comments.
Oh, and I almost forgot — this is me: @joelogon, but I’m telling you now — if I don’t know you, I probably won’t follow you.
Maybe I’m still doing it wrong.
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