The World’s 2,453,346th Blog Post About Twitter
I’ve had a Twitter account for several months now. And I barely use it. In fact, I used the Twitter for Facebook app so that my Twitter updates and Facebook status are always the same thing. I’ve been a Facebook power user for years, and as of yet didn’t have a reason to put any additional effort into also keeping up a Twitter profile. The only person I knew who actively used it was my brother, and that was only because all of his friends and co-workers used it, and it became a common form of communication for all of them.
Well, today I caved. I downloaded a Twitter app for my desktop (I’m currently using Tweetdeck because it also sends me Facebook status updates, but the window has to be so large! anybody have other suggestions?). I browsed a couple of coworkers’ “following” lists and found more people I knew and suddenly I’ve got a decent number of people to keep up on and I don’t want to refresh a Firefox page all day now that there’s actually content for me to see. Still not on par with the massive Facebook newsfeed I’ve got to follow, but I can see it getting there someday.
But mostly I decided to finally commit to Twitter because it appears it’s going to be around for quite some time as an internet-use standard. As I use the desktop app I realize it’s become less like blogging and more like an instant messaging tool, except you’re broadcasting your messages to everyone. This feels similar to when everyone got on the AIM and/or MSN bandwagon, eight or nine years ago. Except that there is only one Twitter. I wonder when some crazy, renegade alternative micro-blog network will pop up and cause a battle a la AIM-MSN (though those battle lines were mostly geography-based) or Facebook-MySpace (which drew divides among education and age levels). What will separate Twitter users from the others, and what new must-have internet communication and networking tool will come along in a few years to replace them all?
May 9, 2009 at 8:53 pm
As the brother in question, let me clear up and add on:
* The real reason I started using Twitter was so that I had a forum for all of my shitty one liners.
* Tying Twitter into Facebook means I actually start using Facebook now. In fact, my MySpace usage has dropped to almost nil.
* Twitterfox is the only Twitter client I use; it ties into the bottom Firefox bar, and since I always have a browser window open, it piggybacks alongside my current Internet habits.
* There *are*, apparently, Twitter competitors! Just search for “twitter competitors” on your favorite search engine and see what happens.