This postAfter resisting for a long time, I’ve given in: I’m now on Twitter. :) (Username bencrowder.)
Why’d I join? For a while I felt like Twitter was just Facebook status lines on steroids — an endless need to put something in that status area and change it regularly. I don’t want more of that. I really don’t.
But then I read Rands’ We Travel in Tribes article (warning, there’s some strong language), and I realized that Twitter is more than just a status line. First, it’s blogging in miniature. And I like blogging. (As if you couldn’t tell. :P) This way I can send write shorter bits more often, which’ll be nice when I don’t have time to write a full post. And the writer in me is intrigued at the 140-character constraint — that’s a perfect inspiration for creativity right there, folks.
Second, Twitter is a way to get answers to questions:
Where I used to use Google, I now use Twitter for questions, because not only do I get the answer, I also get the opinion. And sometimes I get my world rocked with random, psychic, off-the-cuff, tangential information that Google will never give me because Google doesn’t know who I am.
There’ve been times where I’ve thought about using Facebook statuses to get answers, but it hasn’t felt like a really good vehicle for that, primarily because you can’t reply specifically to a status line — you can only write on someone’s wall, but if they change their status later, then it’s almost impossible to go back and find what you were replying to.
Third, I love people, and as Rands says in his yard sale post, “Twitter is all the social with very little network.” That’s the part that has me most excited, honestly. I could talk with people all day long. (Not that I would, of course — there’s a limit beyond which your productivity goes down a lot. But that’s neither here nor there. :))
I do have to say that I get the feeling that there aren’t that many people on Twitter — from my own Gmail contact list, for example, there’ve been several hundred on Facebook, and only 32 on Twitter. But I suppose it’s about quality and not quantity. ;)
Anyway, we’ll see how it pans out over the next few weeks; after I’ve tweeted around for a while, maybe I’ll be singing a different tune. Or maybe, like Michael Arrington, I’ll be saying that “I now need Twitter more than Twitter needs me.” (Check out BusinessWeek’s article on why Twitter matters.)
