I have had a hard time wrapping my head around the Facebook/Twitter phenomenon. Does anyone really have a thousand “friends”? Do I really care when someone, even a close friend, drinks a coffee, eats a bagel, or scratches their armpits? Not really…
And yet I have been curious. I poked around MySpace back when it was “the new thing”, and created a Facebook account (which I’ve since forgotten) when they still had only a couple million subscribers. I’ve never really touched Twitter, though- I think mostly because the short-form, incredibly “noisy” form of communication to be difficult to imagine being useful. I haven’t really changed my opinion but, as with MySpace and Facebook before, I feel I should give the latest social network “it” thing a chance. Maybe “microblogging” can live alongside my “macroblogging”?
So far, I’ve added four people I’m actually sort of interested in to “follow”. Right away, I prefer the nomenclature in Twitter- I’m not saying Robert Scoble or Ryan Sohmer are my “friends”, I’m just “following” them because I’m interested. Yeah, I know, it’s a subtle thing, but it makes me less inclined to dismiss the thing right out of the gate. I have only one real friend that I know has a twitter account (Tim Breitkreutz), so of course I’m following him as well.
In addition to the Twitter itself, I get to play with a new toy on my Blackberry called “TweetGenius“: basically, a client that runs on the Blackberry and allows you to follow and post tweets. At the moment I would say the fun of using TweetGenius is at least in part responsible for me trying out Twitter. It has a very elegant and “fun” interface- I’m still early in the process of figuring out how to use it, but thus far I can heartily recommend it.
You’ll notice a new block of text on the right side of this page: Kelly’s Twits is what I’ve named it for now. This will show several of my most recent tweets. Expect to see this block change several times over the next few days as I experiment with various formats, plugins, and the like.