Last Monday, eight days ago, I published a Twitter “tweet” saying “Fed up with Twitter service levels, going to stay away cold turkey for a few days and check out alternatives.”
Despite feeling pulled back to the service and doing a few Facebook status updates, I’ve kept to what I said. Even as I write this, I feel the tug of Twitter, longing to catch up with the moment to moment goings-on of friends and colleagues, wanting to saying something short and profound in 140 characters or less.
I did three tweets in November of 2007 and then ignored it for four months. I picked it up seriously on March 12 of this year and then wrote 334 updates through June 2. By my count, that’s 84 days since the restart and an average of 3.976 (ok, say 4) tweets per day. My sense is that this is a relatively small number of daily updates for consistent users.
It was fun, it was cool, it was frustrating. It often seemed that when I wanted to do an update, the service was down. What was meant to take a few seconds took a few minutes. I saw opportunities pass by when I wanted to give a blow-by-blow account of what I was seeing or thinking or doing, but could not access the service.
While I was doing it, even to my limited degree, I questioned whether my content had any value and was worth the time it took, especially with the service down times. I used Alex King’s excellent Twitter tools to digest my daily tweets and publish them on my blog. For me they were documentation of the things I thought about during the day. For some others they were annoying if not cryptic.
Was I giving out too much information? Should I have provided GPS coordinates so that I could label my thoughts with where on Earth I had them?
Was I not saying enough of importance? By reading them would others conclude I thought about trivial things all day?
Was I over-analyzing all of this? Did I have time to think these meta thoughts? Couldn’t I just relax and let go?
A persistent question was whether the twittering was hurting my blogging. I think it probably did. By blasting out short little thoughts I was using the time that could have been better applied to thinking and writing blog entries, even if they weren’t on “work” topics.
One of the nice things about the social networking services is that there are so many of them, often experimental, and no one forces you to use one or all of them. My current ideas about Twitter may be completely different from what others feel about it. Great!
Will I go back? If it was any form of an addiction, saying I could go on using it with just one “drink” or “hit” a day probably wouldn’t be wise.
I do plan to do the occasional Facebook status update but not as a constant chronicle of the thoughts that pop into my head. I think FriendFeed is interesting in how it combines many different inputs from people and I enjoy seeing the tweets with other content and links people want to surface. That is, perhaps part of my issue with Twitter is that it is so one-dimensional.
Finally, I think I made the wrong decision to post the tweets to my blog. They should have been ephemeral, said and gone. Anything that warranted posting to the blog should have had its own entry.
I plan to keep investigating the social networking services because while this isn’t working for me now, some variation of software or my interaction with it might pull me back to Twitter-like journaling.
Remember, to each his own, and I wish you a lot of luck with Twitter and the other services.
In case you were curious, I do think I’ll do one last tweet pointing to this blog entry. But that’s it. Really.
I also feel that tweets don’t belong on a blog. They feel so out of context to me that they are inappropriate. I have a lot of blog readers (especially on my personal blog) who don’t have a clue what Twitter is so it would also be confusing.
Funny, I was encouraged to finally try twitter after seeing your tweets as they showed up in your RSS feed.
I am learning that it is distracting to follow people, and also distracting to be intrigued by replies to others where I haven’t seen both halves of the conversation.
I also think I blather too much when I am tweeting.
I did find it to be an useful research tool. I have a summize feed that captures tweets with “interop OR interoperability” and have been learning about the Interop 2008 Japan conference (mostly in Japanese though), but the most fascinating news is the successful “teleportation” between Second Life and OpenSim.
So, mining the twitter stream is of some value. I bet you can find “open AND standards” and other goodies, too.
Only yesterday I remembered that I can use Google Alerts for something beside ego surfing, too.
I was going to ping you on Twitter just for fun, but you’re already gone.
That was terrific and well-written. I especially like this line: “Will I go back? If it was any form of an addiction, saying I could go on using it with just one “drink” or “hit” a day probably wouldn’t be wise.” As I mentioned to you over Facebook, I posted like five or six times on Twitter, and then stopped. I think if I had really close friends and family who were on it, I’d do it, and I’d be into it, because I’d be interested in their thoughts and what they’re doing throughout the day. But unfortunately, no one I know outside of the tech sector is using it…. This is not to say I might not go back to it. As for now, my last tweet — if that’s what you call it — was this, three months ago: Overheard: “I hate Twitter because nobody cares what I’m doing, and I don’t care what you’re doing ‘cuz i only care about what i’m doing!” :)
Bob, I really liked your twitter posts. They lured me in a wide variety of directions and sentiments I wouldn’t have bothered with on my own. Living vicariously through you was my last best hope! (ha ha) Find an alternative if you like, but I hope to see some form of your ’stream.’ It was a nice break throughout the day.
When telephones were first implemented as party lines, some people couldn’t resist listening in on each other. The technology evolved to private channels. IMO, there is something distinctly creepy about Twitter so I don’t bother with it, and something distinctly pathetic about wanting to share all thoughts with other Twits.
I’m not that fond of this Blackberry either. :-)
Just as people have to find their voice on blogging, they have to find their voice in twittering.
I’ve been using Twitter because my professional blog is in bursts, and my personal photoblogging is 5 months behind. I only do one tweet per day, summarizing the day, plus the city and day of week. Since Twitter feeds to Facebook, I only have to update in one place.
The net result has been that when I travel, people at least know what city I am in, and have sent me invitations to get together. This is serving the function that Dopplr suggests, but with greater personalization and more currency.
Maybe you haven’t found your 140-character voice, yet.
“Maybe you haven’t found your 140-character voice, yet.”
I did. I killed it. It was a nag. :-)
I used Twitter last night to live-blog a school board meeting. Previously, I live-blogged using an online forum where I had to keep updating my post. Twitter worked better for live-blogging. I enjoyed the interaction with a “follower”, and the character limit kept me from getting distracted from the meeting itself.
However, from the reader’s perspective, I imagine my tweets seemed like a disjointed mess. The nice part is that now I have a handy set of notes on which I can base a future blog post.
Behind the firewall at work, I’m using a Twitter-like utility to keep track of setting up a training room. I’ll transcribe my tweets into a reference document later. By including my colleagues as “friends”, we can have asynchronous conversations. This is less intrusive than chats, and well-suited to my team which is geographically dispersed. When one of us is leading a training class, the rest of us can provide backup fielding questions from students.
The more I think about it, the more uses I come up with. I tried a couple “this is what I’m doing/thinking” tweets, but concluded it was fairly useless. Purpose-driven tweets is the way to go.