Why I Twitter

[Ryan]

Hunh? What's Twitter?

Twitter is a service where you answer the question, "What are you doing?" in 160 characters or less. Your friends can subscribe to your twitter feed and get updates when you're doing stuff.

So? That's dumb.

At first glance, it might seem dumb. And I get that a lot. From my wife, my sister, my mom, friends who don't twitter, and random strangers. But there are reasons I twitter and I'm going to lay them out.

First though, to see what I twitter about, you can head to my twitter page. You can see that it's nothing earth shattering. But that's where I see the beauty of twitter.

Just to lay it out there, none of my close friends twitter. There are really only a few people I get twitters from who I know at all. Sacca is a guy I knew from college who works at Google. Edubya is someone I met here on WG2.0 who I've never met. DanLarsen is a guy I worked with years ago in San Diego. Biz is the guy who started Twitter who I've never met. Fred Thompson is running for President. 8bitkid is a guy from Yahoo! who lives down in LA. As you can see...no close personal friends or family.

So what's the hook? The things that make each of us fascinating people are the little things that happen day in and day out in our lives. It's like the law of regression to the mean. Over a lifetime, we all average out and do pretty much the same things. We go to college, get a job, get married, have kids, retire, play golf. But along the way, interesting things happen to us. If you go down one layer, you've got things like new jobs, vacations, holidays. Go one more layer down and you get the interesting thing that happened at work today, the fantastic meal you just ate at Vin Santo, and the funny thing your kid said. Zoom in there and you get the personal observations and the ways that we as individuals interpret the things that happen to us. The more micro the time scale you look at, the more differentiated the events that shape our lives and the more interesting people become.

Some people say that Twitter creates superficial social contact. Who cares what you're doing in the minutae of your life. I'd flip it and say that the traditional ways that we keep in touch create the superficial relationships. Let's say I call up a friend I haven't talked to in a while. Or email them. Or whatever. "Hey how's it going?" "OK, you?" "Allright thanks." Then you break into the high level updates on the kids and the wife and the job and the college buddies and how the Chargers are doing, then you say goodbye and hang up and talk to them again in a month. You can't dig down to the interesting stuff in a phone call or an email.

Now imagine the same relationship with Twitter. Before this hypothetical call happened, I might know that my friend went to Disneyland with the kids and had tapas at a new place in San Francisco and was overloaded with work on Tuesday and had his first ride in a Prius cab and was frustrated with passive agressive people and that the big dude who played Jaws in the Bond movies was on his flight from London and...well, you get the point. How much more value is there in our phone call now?

The next thing I get is that it takes so much time. That's where twitter becomes elegant in it's simplicity. I update twitter three ways. I can send a txt message from my phone (these are often the most interesting tweets). I can update on the web (often the most thoughtful tweets). There are also a few fun twitter apps that people have built that let you update from your desktop.

And now that updating is easy, it's got to be easy to subscribe too. Fortunately it is. For some people I follow, I get updates sent to my phone. Quick buzz, 140 characters of interesting news about someone I'm interested in, and that's it. Easy. For some people, I only see what they are doing when I go to twitter.com. These are the people I'm interested in, but don't necessarily need to know what they're doing at any given time. The point here is that I get to choose who I follow and how I get their updates. I get only what I want, when I want and I've got control over it.

There are also some fun things you can do with the larger twitter world. You can subscribe to a topic. For example, I'm from Encinitas, CA, so I subscribe to any post that has the word "encinitas" in it. During the San Diego fires, I subscribed to tweets labeled as #sandiegofire to stay on top of what was going on. When we had the 5.6 earthquake a few weeks ago, twitter blew up with people reporting damage and what they were doing when the quate hit. I got information from twitter faster than I did from the network news.

There is one thing I think would make Twitter better. I'd love my friends and family and people I know a bit better to be twittering. I love Twitter with the contacts I have now (only 15 or so), but think how much utility there would be if my sister in Toronto twittered, or my brother who is starting his own business in San Diego, or my colleagues at Yahoo! or my college friends who I don't get to see more than once per year.

I concede that I'm a geek. And that most people probably could care less. And that's probably why most people don't twitter. But ask someone who does, and you'll see a smile when they talk about it.

Feel free to follow me for the minutae that makes me interesting.

[Diane Main]

I just started following you. Do try not to feel stalked.

[Emily W]

W00t.com has a twitter account you can subscribe to when they announce new products and the USGS has a feed for earthquakes that surpass 2.9. That last one is great fun. I also get CNN headline news on mine. FUN!
You're right in getting more people you interact with on there. It is incredibly useful when six people are late for your dinner reservations that they are "stuck on 280", "running late at work" or "trapped under something heavy" all in the form of twitters.