Twitter: The Good, the Bad, and the Fugly

If you hadn't noticed, I've been using twitter rather regularly for the past few weeks.  I like it.  For the most part.

Twitter fills little gaps in my interaction with the online creative community.  Between videos on youtube, there's twitter.  Between blog posts, there's twitter.  One example of how I'm utilizing twitter to further engage the creative community is revealing the ever-popular challenge video details a day or so earlier to my followers on twitter.  A small step, to be sure, but it works.  I also get to utilize it to notify when there's a new blog post--well, let me explain that.

Youtube has subscriptions and people check those on a daily basis.  Twitterers keep tabs on an hourly basis.  This blog, while it has its regular readers, still requires you to check on it periodically for updates.  I have no notification system whatsoever.  Twitter provides that notification.

Whether or not anyone cares to be notified about a new blog post remains to be seen ... one would imagine that if they are interested enough to follow my twitter, they would be interested enough to read a blog, yes?

So after a few weeks of regular use, it's my opinion that twitter is a functional tool that can be very helpful ... when it's put to good use.

Which leads us the fugly side of twitter.

I don't like trends.  I really, REALLY don't like trends.  Twitter, for all its good, is VERY trendy right now.  I gave up on myspace because it was a stupid trend and I never embraced Facebook because it was way painfully trendy.  I tend to automatically dislike the things that the whole of the world's population likes.

Like American Idol.  I just don't get it.

One of the problems with being trendy is that everyone and their mother signs up for it.  Which results in millions of dead accounts.  Now, it's not exactly like I care if someone doesn't use there account or not, but isn't that one of the prevailing issues on youtube?  Inactive accounts diluting your subscription count?  Another problem with all these inactive twitter accounts is that it's giving the platform a false sense of purpose.

Sure, twitter may HAVE 50 billion users, but really only about 6 million actually tweet.  (Those numbers a gross exaggerations meant only to illustrate a point.  There is no factual basis for those numbers nor, er, enough actual, um, people ... in the world.)

Of the entire population of twitter users, only a small fraction actually tweet.  Of those legit twitterers, an even smaller fraction tweet anything of substance.

Substance?  In 140 characters or less?

Like I said, twitter is a functional tool ... depending on how you choose to USE IT.

The fugly part about twitter is that it's full of tweets like this:

"Im eating a banana."

or

"Why am i awake?"

or

"I like pie."

I understand that the premise of twitter is based on answering the question "What are you doing?" but utilizing this microblogging platform for such utterly inept, baseless texting is not only embarrassing but unfair to the people who might actually find you interesting.

All that said, I do like twitter.  It serves a distinct purpose for ME and also provides an handy way to stay in touch with friends I've made throughout the world.  If you can look at the service critically and not only answer "What are you doing?" but "How can I make this work for me?" then I think you could have a good experience with it.  If not, well, there's always tumblr.

Stay creative.  And inventive.

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