- I am a sporadic IM’r. At times, I find it incredibly distracting. Twitter is like the lazy-person’s IM. Post if you want to, listen if you want to. Or not.
- The character limit. For SMS of course — but limitations can often nurture creativity.
- Learning things about your pals that you otherwise would never hear. As mundane as they might be.
Half conversations: “@dude55: you are so totally right on, and I believe what you just said was the most poignant, important, compelling sentence that has ever been posted to the internets.” I sure wish I had a friend named dude55.- It’s lucky enough to have an “e”.
- It’s simple, focused and immediate.
- Because blogging requires too much time and thought.
Yes damnit, I do want to know when you go to bed, or when you’re eating a burrito.
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30 Comments
I’ve never seen this before. It looks really cool. First thing I need is some real-life friends.
Thanks for the link.
This is like the Seinfeld of the internet — a website about nothing. Rather addicting, though.
I can totally understand the character limit = creativity point. For example, “How do I constrain my feelings of absolute loathing and apocalyptic distaste for this within such a tiny space?” Behold the revolution that is MicroThink.
And my god, it takes me days to formulate something that’s even mediocre in the end. Thank you, Twitter (with our poor neglected “e”), thank you forever.
Mmmm burrito.
Another item for the list: I love writing in the third person. It’s almost like role-playing yourself with your friends. DanD is reading simplebits. DanD casts magic missile.
I finally signed up after your post. I’ve seen hints of it here and there, and it’s good to see a personalized service like this take off. It has the same feeling as Flickr or Mozilla – a few “in the know” tech evangelists vouching for it.
What I like about Twitter is that the cool web monkeys are whiling their hours away on there instead of creating neat new things, making my lazy ass look positively productive in comparison.
Thank you Twitter, for making laziness the new over-achiever!
I’ve been using it, a different activity to be sidetracked by instead of going to the RSS reader. Yes its an immediate way of keeping tabs of when people switch on and turn off..
The support is pretty good for us in the UK for mobile texting.
Will have to look at the mobile phone bill to see what the actual price of this addictive web site really is!
I have a blog post about it on my site at Jayonline
I was playing with Jaiku yesterday. Although buggy, I kind of like it for twitter-with-extra approach.
For me it’s also something new. But aren’t these apps closing the real world from us, making us to spend more time on the virtual one?
Ha, I would second what Dave S. said. I like twitter, but for my personality I found it to be a bit too distracting so I had to turn it off for a little while. It was definitely addicting, but a productivity killer at the same time.
Your list, though, is perfect. I especially love the halfway conversations between people that aren’t on my list, so I just get little glimpses. It’s like im eavesdropping on someone talking on the phone, but can’t here what the other end of the conversation.
I see I’m in the minority here, but I just don’t get the appeal of Twitter.
@Dan – I gave it a go and its kind neat but you definitely have to have a group of tech friends who all use it for it to be fun or useful. Unfortunately I’m a geek in a world of regular people that are difficult to convince to use anything.
Erm….. I really don’t see the point of this. I’m already signed up to enough sites that let the world know pointless details about my life.
I laughed out loud at the “e” note…
if there isn’t a dashboard widget I won’t use it.
It’s kind of cool and comfortable post what you’re doing from dashboard! I think you get my idea!
Juan – you may want to check out Twidget (an aptly named Twitter Dashboard widget).
Hmm.
With interest, I visited. Then I left after I posted what I was currently doing.
What’s the point?! LOL
Glad you find it interesting Dan! =)
the best word i’ve seen to describe using twitter (which was born as “twittr” — fortunately the obvious guys got as sick of the missing “e” phenomenon as the rest of us and changed it) is “nudge”.
when i get seemingly pointless updates via twitter it reminds me that i would actually like to talk to those friends. it’s fun to get random tidbits from people i might otherwise be texting or IM’ing.
@Dan:
The first time I hear about twitter, is from your post… Looks like I missed a new geeky-tweeky gadget wave again, LOL :D I quickly made an account for me… just for fun and to see what’s that. Looks pretty cool, at first flance :)
I explored a bit around… Laughed, when checked Luxury Luke’s latest twitt’r post:
“will not twitter anymore. if you’d like to send me your updates, you know where to find me. {closes eyes fiercely}”
…I guess, it could be pretty … time consuming at times if you got addicted to it ;-)
Thanks, Dan, for helping me “twitter-in”, too:)
Happy Twitterin’ :D
And Merry Christmas:)
{optimiced} ;-)
Looks like a really interesting site. Went there and spent an hour looking around. I don’t think I will get any work done this week.
well you are right about the blogging taking up time part.its become a obsession for me.
anyways dont forget to check the site keepv.com to rip or download videos from : YouTube.com, Google.com, Myspace.
twitter looks like fun. it’s a LOT like facebook’s “status updates”, which to me is the most fun part about facebook… not that i’m a typical facebook user (not in school, signed up only very recently). i like facebook’s prompt better: “I am…” and you fill that part in. makes the final sentences read better, imho.
uh oh. updating via IM is fun and handy. also by mobile phone. i can see how this will be addictive. haha.
Another product that I found that does the same thing but has a much better design online is Jaiku. Check it out at http://jaiku.com/
Cheers,
Ethan (16 yr. old blogger+designer)
I think Twitter is one of those face in the crowds things. Like I found your face in the rabble after getting nudged by your snippets in Twitter. I have to remember to turn it off at night.
Actually, quepol, it was originally released as Twttr. Which was pretty bad. Thank goodness they bought some vowels.
Retarded toy for the clinically extroverted.
you should try peekamo.com, you can create private or public groups and post sms messages and best of all its completely free.
It seems to be very nice, thanks for the link!
“Twitter is like the lazy-person’s IM” – He looks to me like some Microsoft product that is not finished!