I’m on Twitter (yah, I can’t believe it either).
For those of you curious to know what I think about it, please read Jason’s post, which is a near-verbatim copy of what I would have said had I written on the topic first. Read. It.
OK, so I told myself I wasn’t going to write any more on the subject, but I can’t resist; I just kind of feel the need to qualify and defend my use of such an ostensible waste of time.
I’m not going to lie, when I first heard about Twitter some months ago, I railed on it and couldn’t believe people were actually excited about such a seemingly banal service. In fact, just a few days ago, I answered Twitter’s “what are you doing?” question with: “feeling dirty and ridiculous for typing this very message.”
I’m not quite sure how to explain it, but sometime in the last few days I’ve kind of come around to Twitter (not least because every single tech-type person I know is on it and because Twitterific is awesome). Now, this is saying a lot for me because I don’t belong to any of the social-networking sites (e.g., MySpace, Friendster, Facebook, Virb, etc.) and gave up IRC and IM cold-turkey a few years ago.
The impetus behind this forbearance is quite simple: I just don’t have the time. What time isn’t taken up by being a first-year associate at a large IP firm is spent on this site, life, etc. The last thing I want to do is unleash my obsessive-compulsive propensities on some web site that isn’t mine — I like to centralize my thoughts and have complete control over how they’re presented.
That said, Twitter is different and I’m not quite sure why. While its purpose and usefulness is as malleable as any web-related thing I’ve ever seen, I’ve found that I, in my very limited use, kind of treat it as a micro-blogging platform where I can just plop down whatever enters my head without having to think too much about it. In other words, the opposite of how I approach posts on this site. There is no pressure.
To be honest, I still haven’t embraced it fully, but I think that over time I’ll be able to, especially when more of my non-tech friends start drinking the kool-aid.
Before getting carried away here, I should temper my enthusiasm with the following caveat: if Twitter starts to ‘devolve’ into a general-purpose IM platform, I’ll likely pull out of it relatively quickly. However, if it can remain a kind of one-to-many status tool, I think I may be using it for some time to come.
Finally, Ev, thank you so much for giving Twitter all of its rightful vowels — I think Twittr would have turned me off from jump.
