I am deeply ambivalent about Twitter.  When it first started to be widely used I found the signal to noise ratio to be way too heavily skewed towards noise to be worth my time to sort through the tweets. 

In the past week Tim O’Reilly and Guy Kawasaki have written thoughtful posts about why they love twitter.  Here is a summary of their thinking:

Tim O’Reilly likes the way Twitter works to establish ambient intimacy:

If I’m interested in someone, I don’t have to ask their permission to follow them. I don’t have to ask if they will be my friend: that is something that evolves naturally over time. If you’re a public figure like I am, the metaphor of mutual “friending” is truly broken. I get tens of thousands of friend requests from people I don’t know. Accepting would make it impossible for me to use a social tool to keep in touch with my real friends….Twitter’s brilliant social architecture means that anyone can follow me, and I can follow anyone else (unless they want to keep their updates private.) Gradually, through repeated contact, we become friends……I know not just what people are thinking about or reading, but enough about what they are doing that our relationship deepens, just like real-world friendships. People who follow me on Twitter learn that I’m making jam or pies, or gardening or riding my bike or feeding the horses, things that I’d never (or rarely, since I’m doing it here) share on my blog.

For O’Reilly, Twitter transcends the web:

Like all of the key internet services today, Twitter is equally at home on the mobile phone. Even on the PC, I find myself using a separate client (Twhirl is an Adobe Air program) that provides a rich, alternate interface.

And finally, Twitter is emblematic of one of O’Reilly’s key principles of Web 2.0:  Data is the Intel Inside. 

Twitter isn’t just a protocol. It’s also a database.  That means that they can let go of controlling the interface. The more other people build on Twitter, the better their position becomes.

Guy Kawasaki is less philosophical and more practical in his advice about twitter.  In an earlier post, He gives good advice about how to build a network of followers (follow the social media whores; follow everyone who follows you; always be linking — I used to give this advice to people who were trying to build blog networks back in the old days).  Once you have built a following you want to monitor what people are saying about you and to ask for help.  And use tools like twitterfeed that enable you to provide an rss feed to twitter from you blog or any source. 

I do follow Tim O’Reilly on twitter (via an rss feed of his tweet in Google Reader) and I find his tweets to be full of useful information.  Rather than document his activity, Tim uses his twitter feed to pass along things he finds interesting.  He is “upstream” of me on a number of topics I care about so he is a good source. 

I find Guy’s tweets to be less valuable.  They are too voluminous — spammy really — to be of value.  More about his actions than interests. 

All that said, I do find twitter to be an interesting tool for communicating around events.  All the event needs is a public hashtag and twitter users who are attending the event can coordinate their interests, pass along notes, and share stuff. 

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008 at 12:45 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.