Over the past few weeks the traditional media have discovered Twitter big time. You can hardly tune in to any radio or television program without being pestered to send a tweet or subscribe to their Twitter feed. They’ve liberally used the CommonCraft video above — often without attribution — to help acquaint their audience to the service.
So do you Twitter? TMV’s Twitter feed carries links to our posts. Me, I’m a consumer of feeds more than a producer of tweets. I might tweet more if I had found an iPhone app that I liked earlier (now there are ten zillion). These days I find myself in agreement with Slate’s Farhad Manjoo who says Facebook’s status updates work better for most of us:
A few months ago, I urged readers to join the social network because you could no longer mistake it for a passing craze; Facebook, I argued, is now a permanent part of the culture, as critical to modern society as e-mail and the cell phone. Since then, to much annoyance, Facebook has redesigned its site to be more Twitter-like. These changes diminish Twitter’s attractiveness: Are you just looking for a way to occasionally send a mass message to your friends? Facebook, where you’ve already established a circle of followers, can be a much faster way of doing so—especially now that it looks so much like Twitter.
Manjoo calls Twitter a totally alien form of communication:
Much of what we do online has obvious analogues in the past: E-mail and IM replace letters and face-to-face chatting. Blogging is personal pamphleteering. Skype is the new landline. Social networks let us map our real-life connections to the Web. It’s not surprising, then, that these new tools deliver obvious social utility—Facebook is the best way to get in touch with old friends, and instant messaging is the quickest way to collaborate with your colleagues across the country. Twitter is different. It’s not a faster or easier way of doing something you did in the past, unless you were one of those people who wrote short “quips” on bathroom stalls. It’s a totally alien form of communication. Microblogging mixes up features of e-mail, IM, blogs, and social networks to create something not just novel but also confusing, and doing it well takes time and patience.
So should you tweet?
Eh, go ahead and give it a try if you like, but there’s nothing lame about waiting to see whether Twitter pans out … Talking to strangers is strange. It takes a certain type of person to do it well—or even to want to do it. If you’re struck with horror at the prospect of telling the world what you ate for dinner, where you’re going on vacation, or what you read in the paper this morning—well, that’s OK. You’re just not that into Twitter, and you’re not alone.