Why I use Twitter
I’ve been wanting to write about this for some time and now that Louis Gray asked, I really need to listen and post about it. First of all, at the moment I put my account private again. I am still torn whether I should keep it public or private but for now, keeping it private makes it just this little bit more free to say stuff. It’s probably just because I am chicken ;)
Above that, I have to say that I only subscribe to @olivert posts on my mobile, nothing else. I would not want to get the gazillions of SMS from all the posts from friends, especially because there are some people that are syndicating their blog posts on there, which I personally think is a clear don’t. You can post your blog post if you think your friends should know, but don’t make it a default.
I am moving further away from answering the question though… ok. I learn stuff. It’s trivial things like two of my friends getting a MacBook Air, or being live with Jason Calacanis forgot his passport at the hotel on his trip back from Paris, or just now David Sifry wondering why all major travel sites have downward trending traffic … I learned about the Sun-MySQL deal first via Twitter; I learned about Qik.com and got my Seesmic invite from Loic. I just answered a friends question about how Google does the Geolocation on the iPod Touch update. It’s weird, but stuff happens on there and as it is a bit like a very very slow IRC channel, you can handle the load and be part of the communication.
It does take a little bit of getting used too, but with something like Twitteriffic, it gets really easy to post and react. And as you have to be short, it is not really something that takes up a lot of time. This post probably took more time now than all the twitter posts I will do today.
So yes Louis, I think you should sign up. It’s not a drag on your performance like IRC (I entered a channel with 150 people yesterday and wondered how I ever managed to keep up :)), so that worry should not be there. Just be selective with your friends. It’s like reading RSS feeds. You might have too many at one point and then you learn to scale down. Slowly you can’t live without it anymore.