Monday, February 2, 2009

Twitter me this, twitter me that

Its Monday morning and my usual twitter time has been derailed by a major Twitter 'Fail -Whale": aptly named for the picture of the friendly whale that pops up when Twitter is giving problems.

I have been using Twitter for about five months now and am hopelessly addicted. Twitter is also one of those services that has become ubiquitous in an insanely short period of time, but yet has no business model (read: no ads or subscription fees) to support it. Thus, as with any pro-bono Internet service, outages often occur.

This is the first morning however that Twitter has not been there for me to reach out and communicate with my Tweeps (read: followers and followed) so I find myself meandering over to my blog.

Twitters power over me is strong. Effin' strong. I am typing this blog entry and am feeling the urge to ALT-TAB Twitter to send a Tweet (read: message): " Am updating my blog whilst having coffee". There's a Tweep called @ladawn (all twitter names are referred to as @xxxxx), who apparently twitters first thing after waking up, offering her kindom for a cup of coffee in bed. Another dude ritualistically 'offers' his coffee-pot around the Twitterverse (trini twitterer @sherwinravi outed me as a nerd for using this term). It's hard to convey the connection I feel with these folks. One of my tweets the other day was "making pancakes for kids whilst sipping espresso..am in heaven".

Making social connections on the Internet is not new. Social Networking services such as Forums, Chat Rooms, Instant Messaging, Blogs and more recently the Myspace and Facebook phenomenon have allowed fairly in-depth relationships to develop between persons who don't know each other in RL. What makes Twitter different seems to be the Real Time nature of the communications and the limiting of the tweets to a lengthy blurb of 140 characters. The real reason is probably harder to pin down. Twitter just seems right. It doesn't have that creepy overtones of some of the other services (@anniepaul knows me as a 'elitist' Facebook loather) though it is a ravenous consumer of your time.

There's so much to share about Twitter that it would be impossible to do it all in a single post. I am also keen to close off this post as I am eager to read @jimmychung's inspirational morning Tweets; to see what great tech news @guykawasaki has sent out; and to see if @ladawn ever did get her coffee served up in bed.

2 comments:

  1. Not something Ive totally come to terms as yet. As I said, Annie Paul 'outed' me as a closet elitist i.e. I dont like Facebook exactly because everyone and their brother is on it. My main revulsion stems from all these people that I havent seen for years asking me to join them onfacebook. I mean there is a reason I havent kept in contact with them for years and suddenly we're expected to share all our family pics? I know you can control this in FB but there still is the politics of who you accept and dont accept as a friend.

    Maybe I just need to get a life and stop being and elitist and open a darn facebook account! :-)

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