About a month ago, I attended a BarCamp-style conference in San Francisco all about social media, and at the beginning of the conference, everyone was asked to introduce themselves and share what their favorite social networking site was–by far, the most frequent response was Twitter. Indeed, Twitter may very likely become one of the great wonders of the world. Who would have thought that a service that dubs itself as nothing more than a way to answer the eternal question, “What are you doing?” would turn out to be as addictive as it has proven to be. As the proud owner of over 4500 tweets since the end of January 2007, I oughta know.
In my opinion, the real reason that Twitter has been successful (despite the fact that its reputation for reliability is the same as, if not worse than, that of MobileMe) is because it’s the first product that fills a real niche in our lives. All of us, particularly myself included, have an inner urge to share certain tidbits of our lives–just to get them out there, whether or not people are even going to care about them. Tweets don’t have to just be about things that we are doing, but often contain things that we are feeling at a particular time. They’re inspired by the moment. For example, a month ago, on July 14th, I pulled up to my local Apple Store to the point where I was surprised to find a long, snaking, around-the-block line for the iPhone 3G–a full three and a half days after the thing first became available! I thought that the situation was just visually hilarious, and I thought of just so many things that could be said to make fun of it, so just to get it out of my head, I sat myself on the park bench outside of the store, cracked open my laptop with the store’s free wifi, and churned away about a dozen tweets on how crazy the situation was.
The fancy, technical name for Twitter and similar services is “microblogging”–quick, little tidbits about our lives that, in Twitter’s case, are limited to 140 characters or less. And indeed, the world of microblogging has, in the last year or two, sprouted up to be as diverse as the blogosphere, but in its own unique ways. Twitter has developed into an environment not only where people are tweeting about the things that they’re doing, but about the things that they’re feeling, quick responses to news that is happening, etc. They’re tweeting about announcements that they want their followers to know about, and using the service to quickly exchange messages back and forth between them and others. Similar to blogging, some users tweet out of the interest of getting more and more people to follow them, others (like me) just tweet to satisfy themselves and couldn’t care less who’s following them.
But tweeting/microblogging is supplemental to blogging–they’re different things meant to serve different purposes, in my opinion. I publish my blog without very many restrictions on what I write. As I’ve discussed before, I blog with one person in mind: me. I blog about things because I want to blog about them, and because I’m inspired to write about them. But one of the rules that I use for my blog is that my blog entries are more significant thoughts that I have developed, and/or content that I want to have lasting value. (Lorelle calls it “blogging timeless.”) My tweets, on the other hand, are somewhat more personal and more on-the-spot because they represent things that I’m doing or thoughts that I’m having at a particular moment, and that don’t really have much lasting value.
This is why I choose to reject the habit of integrating my tweets within the content of my blog like many people do, because I consider them to serve a different value and different purpose than my blog does. I do feel that both my blog and my tweets serve valuable purposes in allowing me to express myself and my thoughts about various topics, and certainly recommend both–but for their own special purposes.
