Why Twitter?
In the past week or so I’ve gone back to using Twitter much more. I used it regularly last year during RailsConf and have always been fascinated with watching the public timeline flow by. It is strangely addicting to me but I think I’ve gotten past the “bright shiny object” stage and have settled into checking it here and there and posting off and on through the day. I’ve heard a number of people who look at Twitter and say “I don’t get it” and I have a hard time articulating the draw it has for me but let me try. I like the fact that you can pick up on random thoughts of people you “know” from your industry (software development in my case) and follow along a bit of what they are up to. I also like the interaction involved in finding new friends. In some ways Twitter reminds me of good ol’ chat but with the differences that the conversations are persistent, the lag between responses is expected, and it is easy to be involved from anyplace. It gets closer to intertwining the stuff you do in your day with your Twitter friends. Twitter doesn’t come without some impact to my day to day life. On the one hand it is occasionally an easy distraction to turn to rather than to focus on the things I should be doing. On the other hand, it is strangely comforting to have the lull of the conversation “always there” and I also find it makes me a bit more outgoing in general. Perhaps this one sounds corny but if you think about the number of people you come into contact with in a day, most of whom you really only have 140 characters worth of dialogue with anyway, Twitter affects those “live interactions” for me as well. The guy in line at the grocery store, the lady in the elevator, the receptionist at the doctor’s office. Having those small, friendly, twitter-like interactions makes my day much more pleasant (I like to think for them as well
