May 15, 2008

Tweet Tweet

It's been almost a week with Twitter now and I definitely am enjoying it. I know this service has great potential, as I'm becoming devoted to it and none of my friends currently use it. You would think with the focus on short asynchronous messages having actual people to communicate to would almost be a friggin requisite, but no.

For one, I've got a little Twitter do-hickey right in the layout, meaning anything I update is included in there. It allows me to expand upon slightly what I've posted about. It allows me to notify anyone following me of a new post. It allows me to just post questions out there and see what kind of response I get from people following me.

Also, it's not as consuming as an IM client, email or social networking application that we use nowadays to communicate. With IM, it's frustrating when the person you're talking to is "afk", and the conversation's choppy. With email, if you answer one, you answer a million it seems these days with all the spam and noise that clutter our inboxes. Social networking? Takes wayy too long.

With Twitter, you don't have any of those expectations. It's just 140 characters and you're done. Want to read what your friends have been tweeting? Each one is only 140 characters long. To put it in perspective, I've already typed more than 140 characters for this paragraph and I'm not even done lauding Twitter yet. Seriously, when I check my Twitter account, I'm done in 3 minutes. And if I don't want to tweet, the expectation isn't there that I have to be tweeting all the time, I just stop tweeting.

But what really sold me was having one of those gee-whiz moments not too long ago when there was a fire drill at work. In testing out the functional of the service, I sent a Tweet from my phone. It was immediately added to my profile and displayed on the blog here. I was floored and instantly saw the potential. I could be anywhere and alert you to anything I might be thinking of.

It's moments like these that blow my mind how far we've come with technology, even in my short lifetime. The future is now. I seriously recommend you try Twitter... you'll fall in love with it too, I promise.

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