Ah, the joys of a Friday afternoon. The weeks since the Comedy Festival ended seem to have been nonstop madness. In that time I've been dealing with Twitter and trying to work out what it's good for.
I've found the joy and frustration of global conversation. I don't really understand why I like it. It has something to do with feeling connected without actually being connected. It's a false intimacy, and that sounds like a bad thing but it isn't.
A couple of months ago I was at the MODM meeting talking to some people who were having an entire conversation about what had happened on Twitter that day. I hadn't really dabbled then and I didn't get it. Somebody tried to explain it to me but it made no sense. Why would anybody want everbody to know what they were doing? Why would they give up their privacy like that?
The magic with Twitter is the way different people use it. Some use it like status updates on Facebook, some use it as conversation, but the most interesting are the ones who use it as a nanoblog. A link with a punchy description can pique my interest. A comment about the world I can't see outside my window might spark an idea.
The other thing is the very nature of writing in only 140 characters. It takes a lot of discipline to get as much of an idea out as possible in around 20 words without using txt shortcode.
I'll probably get sick of it the way I got sick of Facebook (yes, sick of Facebook but still love playing scrabbulous, what a dilemma) but for the moment I'm trying to rock the nanoblog vibe and really enjoying it.