I signed up and first Twittered on March 19th ’08. I would still class Twitter as an early adopter service, I think most people would, it was after all only founded in 2006 and has generated no revenue what-so-ever since then.
Asking some friends (25/26 year old professionals) at the weekend only one out of five had heard of Twitter, and he worked in IT. All of them have a Facebook account.
I don’t have many personal or professional acquaintances who use Twitter and don’t regularly interact on a human level or work directly with any of the people I follow or who follow me on Twitter. This might change in the future as more people pick up the service or if it becomes integrated with another more mainstream service
- Facebook tried and failed to buy Twitter. How Twitter are putting a presumably massive price tag on their service, over $500m, when it makes no money I am not sure. Potential to make money? Have they watched Dragons Den!? Theo wouldn’t have any of it. Take the deal!
I was a bit confused as to what benefit twitter could have for me when I first signed up and what benefit they have from me using their service.
- I am still unclear on the benefit I will have for them as I have no idea how they plan to monetize me. Especially in the current economic climate.
It is a poignant time to write this entry for me because yesterday I posted my on hundred and first Twitter. It was a Twitpic entry taken when I was at Borough Market with some friends. You can see it below. I had planned on having more description but ShoZu only fed through the title with no the description which was something like “Really busy today and prices are up again”.
I posted it because I was surprised at how many people were out buying really expensive food this weekend, I presumed when we went that it would be fairly quiet.
In posting this I thought there was some common interest in how busy a relatively well known place is that I was visiting is to others. I am trying to think how when I twitter “would I want to know about that?”. If that is the case then I don’t think you can go wrong.
I quite like posts like this, they are simple and hold value for me as the publisher to record an event and later look on it to remember the day and to those who read it, because there might be some common interest.
I experimented with the sort of twitters I made when I first signed up asking friends questions, setting up automated feeds to post links I save to Delicious, automatically twittering my latest Facebook status, putting a link through to the latest set of pictures I have put on Flickr, playing Playtwivia and just putting up general thoughts that occur. Some of this I have continued to do and some this I have completely stopped.
I don’t want to Twitter too much. If I want make a Twitter then I want it to carry some value for those who receive it (this is micrblogging, not status, isn’t it?), I don’t want my twitters to overcrowd other peoples already overflowing inboxes, RSS feeds and update lists.
I have no need or desire to tell people what I am doing throughout the day if it is not outside the norm and/or of any value to people through a common interest. I also don’t really have any need to know what they are doing, in fact I would like to filter out some of the stuff people do Twitter.
- Perhaps you should be able to assign a category to your Twitters. Users could then just follow a certain category of twitter. For example “My Life” and “My Work” categories could be created for one user. I could decide to follow both of them of just one of them. For example, I don’t want to know when somebody I am following is watching TV but I would love to know when he has put up some new photos, made a new blog post of has a comment to make on the news.
But this is my character. I am not a nosey person, I hate gossip and run out of the room when people start it. I also don’t listen to people when they tell me about completely pointless stories that do not involve me or anybody I know. But it is their right to do that as it is anybody’s right to use Twitter in whatever way they might like.
Twitter is different things to different people. I think I have just about found what it is for me, although the infant that Twitter is needs to mature in order for me to have a proper relationship with it in the long term.
See my Twitter page here
