In All Reality

Update: for an alternate viewpoint, and one that I agree with wholeheartedly, read Twitter is going to die, by Eric Karjaluoto.

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m a bit of an oddity when it comes to my profession.  Web designers tend to be trendy to a fault, early-adopters, eager to use the latest UI technique.  I’ll also be the first to say that there’s nothing wrong with that at all.  But that isn’t me.  I’m a cautious, calculating person.  Rarely do I jump on the bandwagon without waiting to see how many people fall off on the curves first.  Enter Twitter.

*Tweet*

Twitter has been an Internet phenomenon for several years now.  The idea is pretty simple: you get 140 characters per post, with the aim of keeping posts simple.  It takes its idea from birds sitting in trees, sending short “tweets” to their neighbors as a means of communication.  You can follow other Twitter members, send responses back to people who have posted something of interest, and customize how your profile and updates are viewed.

Just based on the capabilities, it’s pretty cool.  Twitter has quickly become adopted as an Internet standard for communication, and there are a ton of independent services that have been built around people generating their “tweets.”  “Then what, Ryan,” you may ask “is your problem?”

“Isn’t Twitter just too much information?”

That question is taken directly from Twitter’s site, and kudos to them for addressing such a  critical concern in a very open manner.  I have some very strong opinions on the Internet, the free exchange of ideas and communication, and where a willful loss of privacy falls in to the mix.  My first inclination is to dismiss Twitter, seeing it simply as another means for me to reveal more (albeit small) chunks of my personal life to The Web.

I’m all about community, and getting to know others, but I think the mass scale on which this occurs and the fact that you don’t have any way of knowing exactly who is listening in on those relationships being developed makes me a bit edgy, to say the least.  This is especially true with Twitter, where I can get a link to anyone’s update page and start deducing some very interesting things about their life.  Sure, there’s an option to hide your profile from anyone who isn’t following you…but then why are you using Twitter in the first place?  But the option is there, so I have say that particular concern has been addressed.

Twitter: 1
Ryan: 0

It’s All In Who You Know

This article is a semi-direct result of a conversation I was having online (just today in fact) with friend and fellow web junkie, Ted Kaemming.  Conversation is perhaps too light a word…more of a heated discussion on why I wasn’t using Twitter.  Ted’s main argument was that it’s yet another way to reach a potential audience, with the main end goal being to gain notoriety and further your career.  My main argument was that I didn’t need another way to reach my potential audience and that if I had one more profile or feed that I had to generate content for then I wouldn’t be able to focus on the notoriety I had and making money from my career.  I believe this ended in a stalemate.

Ted’s point is valid though: people want to choose their medium of receiving and sharing information, a lot people seem to have chosen Twitter, and those people don’t care a bit if I think it’s silly of them to do so.  And I have to admit that working out of Springfield, MO means that I can use all the outside contacts I can get.

Twitter: 2
Ryan: 0

Yeah, yeah…but what about the updates?

Building off my reservations so far, my biggest concern apart from privacy was the daunting fact that I would have one more medium that I needed to update to receive any sort of benefit from.  Generating new content for this site is a big enough struggle for me sometimes when trying to keep up with my workload and the mundane tasks of day to day life.  I already maintain a website, and that website generates an RSS feed via the magic of WordPress, so why do I need another RSS feed…especially one limited to 140 characters per post?

Twitter Advocate (i.e. Ted) pointed me to this site: http://twitterfeed.com/ It’s a third-party service that takes your Twitter account info and the address of any feed you want, and publishes updates on the feed to your Twitter wall…er branch…or whatever it’s called.  Other like-minded services exist such as TweetFeed, each with their own spin on integrating Twitter’s posts into standardized RSS.

Well, that takes care of having to make constant updates to keep having a Twitter account meaningful.  And Twitter did spur this post, which will now be added to the development of this site…so…

Twitter: 3
Ryan: 0

The Trendy Anti-Trendsetter

My final wall of defense against Twitter has/had to have been my innate resistance to being overly trendy.  There are the people who ignore trends.  There are the people who set trends.  There are the people who adopt trends, thus making them less trendy.  And then there’s me: someone who really has a desire to be somewhere outside all of this and do his own thing but really doesn’t have the faintest idea how to survive doing it.  But with the desire to be creative must come the realization that in many cases someone has probably already done what you want to do, and probably a lot of other people have seen it and think it’s really neat and start doing it themselves.

And we’re back to Twitter.  I can’t deny that, even with my reservations, the idea behind it is really pretty cool and at the very least can be a useful tool for establishing your own little niche on the Web.  Yes, everyone is doing it, and that makes me not want to, but sometimes the masses can be right (though history often teaches that the masses are usually completely ignorant, blood-thirsty zombies).  Yes, it requires near-constant updates to be viable, but there are ways to integrate other updating platforms to ease the load.  I’ve watched, I’ve read, and I’ve seen the benefits of twittering, even against my comfort zone.

So, I guess what I’m saying is: *Tweet*