What are you doing? I wonder. Supplying the answer is the idea behind Twitter, a service launched several months ago but which now seems to have reached critical mass.
It’s a weird service in many respects, you simply fill in a form describing what you’re up to. You can use the website, an IM client or a phone to fill in the 154 characters allowed for your message. That message appears on the website, and your friends, real or imaginary, can subscribe to those messages.
What’s weird about it, is that unless your name is Paris Hilton, the answer to the question is necessarily pretty mundane: reading through blog posts, in the office, waiting for the bus. Why, you might wonder, would anyone be interested in (a) updating it or (b) reading it?
And that’s what I thought before I got hooked. Then you start clicking on other people (you can search for people by name, phone number or email) and you can look at what they’re doing. You can also see what their friends are up to. Unless you switch on the privacy option, it’s an excellent place for people to do a little cyber-stalking.
I am not really sure I know the answer to the question why are you reading about these people you barely know waiting for the bus? But I do know I really quite enjoy it. Perhaps it is related to the appeal of blogs and social networks. There’s a little bit of voyeur in all of us. It also gets me closer to the people I read in other contexts. The blogs I subscribe to nearly all fall under the ‘business & technology’ category. We don’t do posts about waiting for the gas man to arrive or getting on the bus to Norwich. In some senses, Twitter is perhaps filling the gaps and providing some of the sense of intimacy we want from our fellow bloggers? We — the people who read this blog — like ideas — a lot — but we probably like people just as much, if not more.
Perhaps a similar urge to connect — in a fuller sense than these blogs offer us — is behind the meteoric rise of MyBlogLog, too. Readers no longer just come and go, but leave digital fingerprints in the form of those embarrassing rogues’ galleries that have appeared across the blogosphere in such a short period.
Postscript: Get more news and updates from the Twitter blog. From which I found this link very accurately and cleverly describing Twitter as ‘the Seinfeld of the internet: a website about nothing.’ Is it any wonder that I’m also a fan of the series?
I’m on Twitter here if you want to stalkfollow me — but I only wait for the train and work in the office, to be honest.
PPS: Another thing I meant to talk about, but the pub was more pressing, was the distributed nature of Twitter. You don’t have to go to the website for messages. You can follow people and the service will update you on mobile devices or on your own websites. I’m running a twitter widget for wordpress to keep my twaddle up-to-date on this site (bottom right). The bigger question, which I hope to address either here or at NMK is whether a widgetised future is already happening…
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Twitter — let’s try it…
Twitter is the latest thing in social networks and attention economy.
You can publish your status (what are you doing), share that with the world and follow “twitters” from you friends. Add to this “soup” RSS feeds and support for IM and mobile…