Thoughts on Twitter
I’ve been using Twitter for a couple weeks now, which is about a week and a half longer than I expected to use it, and I must admit there’s a certain draw to it. It feels like a massive public IM conversation, with a bit of micro-blogging thrown in for good measure. It’s been interesting to see what kinds of conversations crop up, and when someone asks a question they tend to get a much faster response than if, say, they wrote a blog post and waited for people to see it in their feed reader and then hope someone leaves a comment. That kind of immediacy is useful.
Of course, there’s lots of fun being had in Twitterland as well, and I seem to be a favorite target of many people. But the ability to organically follow other people and have other people follow you is what makes Twitter. It’s almost *too* easy to follow people, and the next thing you know you just added 20 people to your list in about 20 seconds. There’s something to be said for that simple simplicity.
However, Twitter is not without faults, and it has one major problem: uptime. As in, it doesn’t have much. Twitter’s reliability is pretty bad. I get the underlying problems with trying to scale something that grew so quick so fast, but jeez, it’s really frustrating at times. Much has been made about Twitter’s (un)reliability and they deserve all the negativity that comes with it, but hopefully they can get things on more solid footing as time goes on.
That being said, I like Twitter and will continue to use it. It’s simple, has decent tools to tweet with (I’m sure someone will tell me I misused “tweet”), and it helps me keep in touch with people I’d like to keep in touch with. And that’s cool.
