What Twitter is to me

The other day I had a long conversation on IRC about Twitter with a few people who claimed Twitter was silly, useless, or ego-stroking. My argument, as it tends to be, is that Twitter is a lot of things to a lot of people, and the beauty of it is that it is up to you, as the user, to decide what Twitter will be to you. There are a lot of things I use Twitter for, some similar, some different, and maybe some of these will interest you.

News

The first thing, and the simplest, is a sort of ‘live feed’ of various sorts. I follow some organizations like the Associated Press, CBC News, TechCrunch, Techvibes, The Vancouver Sun, and so on. These are generally news organizations or interesting blogs that tweet when there are updates.

Why not just subscribe to RSS feeds? Well, one of the issues I’ve had in the past with RSS feeds is that if I don’t check them for a while, they pile up. Eventually (sometimes even just over a weekend) they’ll build up to unmanageable numbers, at which point I just start ignoring them. Let’s face it, I don’t have the inclination to catch up on 200 news stories.

I’ve also seen some RSS/Atom feeds that are inherently broken. Penny Arcade’s feed, for example, would tend to suddenly show 10-15 new posts (sometimes far, far more), when in reality all that was happening was old stories were getting re-published. I’d get to work and see 30 updates from Penny Arcade, only to find out that there were, in fact, no updates at all. With Twitter, I either see an update as it happens, or I don’t. In the mornings, I can scroll back through the morning’s updates, but I’m not overwhelmed trying to sort through 40 new articles from every site. If I want to do that, I may as well go to the site itself.

Local Legends

I have subscribed to a lot of interesting local people on Twitter. Among the more well-known:

• Rick Yaeger, founder of MacMerc.com and friend of Greg Grunberg (who plays Matt Parkman from Heroes);
• The iPhoneinCanada blog (actually, it’s the man behind the blog);
• Local reporter Gillian Shaw, ‘digital life writer’ for The Vancouver Sun;
• Local 95 Crave DJ, 24 Hours tech columnist, and all-around interesting guy Buzz Bishop;
• Tech journalist, broadcaster, author, and former dot-com startup CEO Tod Maffin (who I originally met in line for the iPhone on launch day);
• Writer, social media evangelist, and actress Monica Hamburg;
• Online luxury condo realtor Ian Watt, through whom I see all the condos I wish I could afford;
• Last, but not least, local blogger, writer, entrepreneur, and social media empress Rebecca Bollwitt.

I follow these people, not because they are influential or ‘famous’, but because they are involved. Especially being relatively new to Vancouver, I don’t really know much about what’s going on in a general sense. Following these people gives me insights into local news and events. I learn about events, charities, parties, sales, and so on from these people, because they tend to be the first on the scene, as it were. By following people who are involved in local events, I become aware of local events and of how I can contribute to and take part in my community.

Friends

It goes largely without saying that I follow my friends and coworkers on Twitter. It’s a quick and easy way of seeing what people are up to in brief. There’ve been a few occasions where I’ve met people for lunch or coffee because I happened to see they were in the neighbourhood. In another example, a neighbour asked me to check his mail while on vacation – via Twitter. In this case, Twitter is just one of many ways to stay connected with my friends.

Locals

I’ve also found a lot of people through Twitter Search who are in my local area. I like to follow other random (or not-so-random) people from my area so as to stay up-to-date with what’s going on. This is the sort of thing that’s led me to visit (and document) the Gastown Snowball Fight, which was largely organized via Twitter by people who work here in Gastown.

A Good Laugh

A lot of people are both Twitter users and intensely funny. My favourite recent example is The Bloggess, author of one of the most hilarious blogs I’ve ever read in my life. Others:

• Fake Sarah Palin, who provided the funniest running commentary for the 2008 US presidential election (especially during Sarah Palin’s debate with Joe Biden);
• Greg Grunberg, who is hilarious both on Twitter and in the commentary he’s done on the Heroes DVDs;
• Wil Shipley, author of Delicious Library, and his Delicious Librarians (whom you can see at the Delicious Library booth at Macworld 2009); it’s especially amusing to follow all three and watch as Wil’s often-risqué comments about Jessie and Terry rapidly inflate their follower count;

Lots of other reasons

There are as many reasons to use Twitter as there are reasons to read a book – just as it’s up to you to find the type of book you like, it’s likewise up to you to find the people or feeds that interest you. You can post whatever randomness comes to mind – what you had for dinner, what’s on your desk, etc. – or you can choose a topic or style that you excel at and focus on that. How you use Twitter is up to you, and while it’s not for everyone (nothing is, except oxygen), you can’t judge a book by its cover.

My advice to everyone is that, as with everything, you should consider it before rejecting it – especially for reasons that. One of the reasons given in the aforementioned IRC conversation was that ‘people on Twitter are liars’, specifically that they lie about who they are, what they’re doing, and so on. When I dug into this assertion a little deeper, I found that the person making the claim knew a few people, and read their tweets, and saw that they were not only lying about themselves, but also seemed to believe them.

My rebuttal? Just because her friends are delusional doesn’t mean they all are. Likewise, just because some people I follow like pumpkin pie doesn’t mean that Twitter is full of pie fanatics. There are a myriad of people on Twitter, each with their own reasons for being there. Don’t be afraid to search for topics that interest you, follow people that sound interesting, and unfollow people that don’t turn out to be.

There’s lots out there for everyone – it’s up to you to find it.