3greeneggs

I have to admit that when I first heard about Twitter, I really didn’t get it. I joined, poked around, and promptly ignored it for a few months. For those of you aren’t immersed in the trendy web tech culture, Twitter is a microblogging site where millions of people use the web, IM, or SMS to answer one question: What are you doing?

(That paragraph, btw, inspired me to update my twitter page to say, “Writing a blog post about twitter.”)

You might see why, on the surface, this makes no sense. Who cares what people are doing? Who (aside from the standard cast of exhibitionists) wants to broadcast their every activity publicly on the web? And yet, the buzz about Twitter kept growing. I heard it mentioned in sentences with the words, “addicting”, “awesome”, and “useful”, which makes it sound like coffee. There had to be something to it.

I ‘asked’ the students in my seminar class to sign up and give it a try for two weeks. Two weeks turned into three, and then four, and now it’s over a month later and most of us are still using it. I’ve even brought a few other people on board, and found several professional connections who use it. And I get it!

Twitter isn’t useful because you really care what everyone is doing. Twitter is useful because it is a lightweight communication tool that enables serendipitous connections around shared interests. It broadens the set of people whose activities you stay aware of so widely that it’s only natural that you and your contacts will find overlapping interests.

I will continue to use Twitter, and I’m sure the value I gain from it will increase as the community grows and the Twitter team adds features and increases stability. I also just found out about Jaiku, another microblogging site which has some of the features I really wish Twitter had (groups, RSS in streams…) Now I just need a tool to post to both simultaneously.