A Week of Twitter

A Week of Twitter

No, this isn’t one of those blog posts where someone just reprints all their Twitter posts. It’s my views on Twitter after being on it for a week (a bit more, actually).

I like it a lot more than I thought I would. It moves fast and is always fresh. It’s more dynamic than other similar social networking opportunities like, say, Facebook. That doesn’t make it better, just different. It’s like listening to music with a much faster beat.

Some people use Twitter as a way to simply text out loud. Virtually all their posts are directed at one specific friend or another, and so they carry on conversations with each other with their tweets, even though everyone can read them. That’s probably the least appealing way to use Twitter, in my opinion. Just a step above are the posts that are just people telling the world what they are doing. Interesting if they’re doing something cool, less so if they’re just eating their breakfast cereal.

Far better are the people who actually have something to say. Posting something of substance that conveys clear meaning in 140 characters or less can be challenging. Some people are terrible at it, and their posts can be taken more than one way or don’t make much sense at all. Some people, however, are really good at it.

There’s a truism that while people think that short stories would be easier to write than novels, it’s often just the opposite. At the very least, most authors will tell you that they’re very different skills. The same, it would seem, can be said of Twitter and traditional blogging. That doesn’t mean that one is better than the other–just that they’re different, and serve different purposes. That’s my big challenge: figuring out what to write about here and what to mention briefly on Twitter.