THREE YEARS AGO, I finally acquiesced to Liam Burke's prodding and I set up a Twttr account. I avoided taking the leap before that time because I'm a vowel guy and besides lacking vowels, Twitter also had that hulk-green look. I preferred the pastel green of Jaiku to Twitter's shade of sweaty green. Unable to placate @burkie any other way, I swam out into Twitter's waters and immediately encountered the Fail Whale even before the first 100 people in Ireland had established Twitter accounts. I still complain about Twitter's apparent scaling issues but have noticed reliability has improved on the Twitter's system. But since it's useless at threading and prone to single point of failure, I don't rely on Twitter as a first port of call when checking out the flow of things. Instead, I use Facebook mobile where I can also see tweets as they're cross-posted. And I won't recommend government agencies using Twitter as their one and only touchpoint for short-notice advisories because Twitter isn't configured as a robust communications channel. Twitter is an information stream and it that means Twitter sits in a unique place. In fact, Twitter has become the most potent form of microblogging since 21 March 2006, the day it first opened for use.
I'm still curious about the business model of Twitter. It feels like it has become an appendage for mainstream broadcasters and celebrities. If you have a big name, you're probably going to amass a million followers because Twitter will place you on its Suggested User List (SUL). And because new users will automatically subscribe to an SUL celeb, they will stay subscribed even when the celebrities stop tweeting. Unlike the SUL, hand-rolled Twitter lists provide interesting reading. They're one part endorsement and one part humour. I've made my own "owes-me-a-pint" list and hope it extends my very own personal Christmas cheer.
During the past three years, Twitter has been most helpful in curating content for me. I use mobile phone RSS feeds to pull information from 12 Twitter accounts onto the screen of my phone where they're often as informative as news headlines. I've learned that even when some people stop tweeting, they continue marking content as "favorites" and those favs are part of the genre of curated content.
I have discovered ways to boost blog readership, to increase the number of views of a Flickr image and to attract viewers to my movie clips by posting summaries of that kind of content on Twitter. I've also seen a bothersome rise of self-promotion, petulance and pettiness on Twitter. Like in the real world, packs of little minds run around on Twitter but the wonderful thing about Twitter is that you can just unfollow the pettiness with a single click.
When even that gets to be too much work, I head over to Foursquare to see if any special offers have surfaced near venues where I enjoy spending real time and money. Or I go with the flow on Friendfeed while waiting for the latest episode of FFunderdercats to drop.
I am @topgold on Twitter and on Jaiku.
