My new world of 140 characters
The web’s been full of Twitter buzz for a while now. Some love it, some hate it, some call it shallow and silly, while some come up with weird theories and banal research deeming it dangerous. Reams of online/print media, hours of phone/telly/web time on interviews/talks/tweetups, scores of blog and other portals have been going tizzy over the Twitter idea, over what can one do with Twitter, over speculation on take over bids, over it’s almost non-existent business model now, over it’s next possible business model, and over it’s been touted the next Google.
Naysayers may dismiss the 140 characters long “What are you doing?” as trivial rubbish, but this seemingly innocuous 140 characters (or less) is enough to get you a job offered, fired, fined, sued, married, freed after being arrested, cause professional embarrassment and transmit groundbreaking announcement.
I registered my Twitter account some 2 yrs back while it was still a shiny new toy (out here), managed to grab my rather common name as Twitter handle, but abandoned it since. Towards the end sometime last year, I finally gave it a jumpstart. I did look out for “Tia” and close-ups, but they were all signed up. Shoving @generalmumbojumbo down, as a handle, would have been too much of a challenge with the already strenuously tough 140 characters limit for tweets, so sticked to my short name instead (so sorry, not flaunting my Twitter handle as yet).
Simple as it is, it wasn’t very difficult to catch on. Its micro-blog styled messaging grows on you. The 140 limit, more than being infuriating, forced discipline in me. In an attempt to fit in a more concise thought, I had to re-read re-think re-write quite a bit. In the process, I often caught all kinds of typos — misspellings, repetitive words, wrong prepositions etcetera. Spelling errors weren't really a surprise, it happens. Redundant words definitely were; like saying, "re-reading the book again". “In” “on” preposition mix-ups are pretty common. But realised how using “of” instead of “for” changed what I actually meant, seconds too late. For instance, just mull over “menu of the day” and “menu for the day”. Ok, I'm about digressing.
While brevity’s indeed proven to be the soul of the wit for most of my over 140 character tweets; for the ones off the 140 radar, I have more than once called "don't! wait!" as I pulled my finger that tapped the return key. Wish there was an edit for 15 seconds, much like how Basecamp allows comment editing on messages for 15 minutes or the more recent undo send of Gmail. Of course there is always a delete, but I’d rather not use that if I could.
I love its concept of followers and following. Unlike most social networking sites out there, I can follow someone in a single click. I decide whom I want to follow — friends, great brands, interesting folks, possibly-interesting-random-folks-following-me and celebrities. Not everyone’s interested in my yapping, and the cool thing is, they don’t have to follow me back for me to get updates of what they say. But let’s say some tweets later, someone started tweet-spamming with streams of inconsequential RTs (retweets, like a mail forward) and #followfriday's, someone said something that just pissed me off, someone turned out to be a fake celebrity, someone’s interestingness took a big nosedive, or I was just going nuts following hundreds and keeping up with my cramped timeline. What now? First off, don't panic. Just hit remove. Unfollowing someone is as simple as following them, again, just a click away.
I use their search a lot, looking for tweet-mentions of company brand, competitors and general trends. What got me really hooked, though, was the endless stream of instant aggregated news in the twitosphere, during the Mumbai terrorist attack last November. It proved its awesomeness in a time of great need; people all over the world were tweeting and setting up aggregators to read these tweets. There were so many updates on it that it was refreshing furiously at a pace faster than I could catch up! Their search deserves a place on the fixed sidebar, and they just did that two days back.
When I started out, I was wondering why they don’t track all mentions of @name instead of just tracking replies beginning with @name under /replies. And they added that soon enough too. My only two gripes now are its mostly non-functional advance search and the somewhat buggy replies. Most of the advance search (with additional operators) gives no result or serves a page with “The page you were looking for doesn't exist” message. And although it’s a 404 page implying I mistyped or the page moved etc, it doesn’t serve its standard 404 page either. Bollocks, you say? Go ahead and try one like “twitter from:ev since:2009-04-01 until:2009-05-01”. And well, if it does work, just thank me for driving your attention there :) Now about the mentions or @name page, the first page load gets you the data right. But just do a “more” and scroll, you’re gonna find your timeline there and not mentions!
Ok, I'm very nearly done with the Twitter banter. Hush that sigh now!
For the uninitiated, try it once before you judge it. I can faintly hear some shout outs for Facebook, Orkut and the kinds. But it's no toss-up really. You got to use it to get it. And once you do get it, you’ll love it. There are of course, the Maureen Dowds who are never gonna get it or perhaps don’t want to get it. In case you’re wondering, she’s the nutcase who was ridiculed for her absurd and unintentionally hilarious Twitter interview. Don’t worry, she’s one of a kind.
Looking for more to do here? There are hoards of Twitter clients and twitter-specific apps floating around to help you manage your updates on windows, mac and mobile; and do a buncha other cool stuffs.
Twitter is gradually evolving as an incredible insta news search engine. Over a period of time, with millions of active users; an enhanced search and data packed to the gills, bulging at the seams; it could emerge to be a real-time Google. Who knows, some predict so...
posted by Tia! @ 2:02 AM
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