I’ve spent the last few months playing with Twitter, and while some of my experience has been painful (not due in any part to Twitter itself), I’ve learned quite a bit about the people I follow and the general workings of this new communication medium. (Des’ Podcast on Twitter)
For those of you who aren’t twittering yet, Twitter is much like a group instant messaging platform that allows users to stay current on each others’ status and the resulting status updates are archived by user.
There are any number of mashups using twitter (TwitterBuzz and Twitterholic), 10 that I’ve seen in the last week, and people are almost smothering this thing to death with hype love. I’ve also seen quite a few people who don’t like the service, but it seems to be their main complaint is that it is a waste of their time.
Love
I don’t do the level of reporting on Twitter that heavy users do, like Scoble, Hsien or Nick, but I do a fair amount of twittering daily. Lately, this and my recent travel schedule has been to the detriment of my blogging, but I’m trying to get my habit under control.
I’ve had to up my monthly text messaging to the most Verizon will allow at 5K per month, and I’m going to have to buy an extra battery for my Treo (won’t make it 24 hours anymore), but the constant news stream from colleagues and from news agencies like CNN and Techmeme, is great, and I don’t see myself falling out of love with Twitter anytime soon.
Hate
The most frequent complaint I see that I also share is the fact that Twitter is limited to 140 characters. It’s difficult to write anything of value within that limitation, so probably a third of my twitters are so long as to force me to twitter it in two messages. However, this is a small price to pay for instant information transfer.
And, while I’ve seen several dozen more complaints, mostly due to system overload and IMs not working, by and large, most users are happy with the service. Sphere, one of my favorite blog search engines (my 2005 interview with Sphere CEO Tony Conrad), reports that almost 2500 posts have been found relating to the messaging service Twitter. Likely Twitter is already on the short list of ‘to buys’ for the big three internet giants. If it is not, it should be…
I’m also Twitter-pated, Robyn. I’ve cut my usage somewhat since they started having IM capability problems, but I’m still hooked. I love being able to quasi-IM with some bloggers I’ve never talked to before, know what they’re up to, and also read and write things that are perhaps not worthy of a lengthy blog post/conversation – like “just burned the chicken,” “anyone know a good western movie?,” that sort of thing.
Yep, is a great service that is gradually taking over my cell phone 😉
Hi Robyn – thanks for the kind words about Sphere.com, much appreciated!
I don’t know if you know this but we released our Sphere Related Content application on FeedFlare and you can now use it on your site – here is a link – http://sphere.wordpress.com/2007/04/07/sphere-related-content-available-through-feedburner-feedflare/
Thanks again.
Tony Conrad
CEO & Founder, Sphere
Thanks Tony, am installing it now.
Hi, Just supposed I’d let you recognize your website is displaying weird in my K-melleon browser. Looks good from what I can see though.