Twitter, the ‘microblogging’ site where entries are limited to a mere 140 characters, seems to be this year’s Facebook. At least in terms of giving newspaper columnists something to write about which doesn’t need that much research. I got an account in – gosh – July 2007, made a few ‘Tweets’ (grimace) on signing up, heard the sound of tumbleweed, then gave it up. It seemed pretty pointless unless it caught on in a big way.
I felt similarly in 1998 when I found out my new mobile phone could send something called ‘text messages’: I didn’t see the point unless it became a commonplace thing to do. It would have been like buying one of the first telephones, or opening the first Tube station – you need a decent amount of other people on the receiving end first.
Being one of the first UK bloggers / online diarists was different, though. I didn’t have to be part of a ‘blogosphere’ or blogging Friends community, because they didn’t exist. If anything, I started the diary to escape the world of groups and chatter, not link up with it. Starting an internet diary in 1997 had more of an existential appeal to me – I blogged, therefore I was.
Twitter, on the other hand, is very much an audience affair – you don’t have readers, you have ‘followers’. Thanks to a few high profile Twitter members of late – Stephen Fry (since Oct 2008 – unusually late for him), Jonathan Ross (December, while twiddling his thumbs away from the BBC) and a survivor of the Hudson River Plane Crash a few weeks ago, plus an upgrade which made photos and phones more Twitter-compatible (much like the coming of predictive messaging for texts, or Blogger and LJ for online diaries), a pretty decent amount of people are now all a-Twitter.
By its own restricted design, it encourages chatty, ephemeral banalities, and makes me sound as if I’m caught not quite with my pants down but certainly with hair uncombed… for better or worse. But it’s a handy stop gap between proper diary posts:
http://twitter.com/dickon_edwards
