As the more observant of you would have noticed, I’ve recently started using Twitter. On Japh‘s recommendation I signed up for an account and followed a few people I knew were using it.
Then I waited for the awesome.
The awesome didn’t come.
Initially, I was quite confused – “What is the point of this? I only know of a few people who use this service and subsequently the stream of information is very very slow. Less of a twitter, more of a dribble. Isn’t this just Facebook with less functionality?”
I stuck with it though. I looked through the list of people followed by friends of mine and slowly my own list grew. I was adding more and more people I knew, thought were interesting or who were famous.
I wasn’t sold on the service until this morning. I checked Twitter and found a ‘Tweet’ from Mike Krahulik (aka Gabe of Penny Arcade fame) letting his followers know that he was broadcasting live on UStream. I followed his link and was able to watch him drawing the upcoming comic live while he responded to our sidebar chat questions by handwriting answers in the whitespace, then erasing them. He followed all of this up with a Q&A session which entailed us asking questions, while he typed his answers into a blank Word document.
The thing that Twitter affords is a connectedness to people who you previously considered unapproachable. I assume this won’t last – you used to be able to do the same thing with email. Perhaps it will? I don’t know.
If you care (unlikely), you can follow my updates by signing up for a Twitter account yourself, or by checking my sidepanel right here on my blog. If you’re a feed reader and haven’t seen the sidepanel, you can even sign up to Twitter RSS feeds on a per-account basis by viewing the desired person‘s profile.
I’m not 100% sold on it, but I’ll give it more time. Impress me, Twitter.
That’s a great Twitter story! 😀
For me, the more people you follow, and the more you try to engage with your followers (and even the people you follow), the more you get out of Twitter.
Recently, I @replied to someone I’m following on Twitter who I’ve been a fan of for quite a while. He lives on the Gold Coast, and I know he occasionally pops down to Hobart. So I asked if he’d like to meet for a coffee and a chat next time… he said yes!!
It was very cool 🙂 It hasn’t happened yet, but it’s due in early April, and even if it doesn’t happen we know interact fairly regularly on Twitter.
Twitter is an awesome and powerful tool… but is yet to settle into it’s place, I think. So it will most likely evolve over the next little while as more and more people start to use it.
I wonder whether Twitter will ever really take off until it becomes a viable money-making tool for its investors?
That’s a tough one, because it already has thousands upon thousands of users… the trick now, if for them to implement a revenue model without alienating said users.
Apparently they have something in mind that’s on the verge of implementation… so I guess we’ll find out soon!