I tweeted for the first time last week. Go ahead and laugh. You
might be next.
I had an excuse: I was doing my job. I tweeted because an editor
thought it might make an amusing story to have a
not-very-tech-savvy senior citizen try to fathom Twitter, the
trendy social media phenomenon that’s spreading across the world
like, well, wildfire.
So I signed up, drank the Kool-Aid and logged on to Twitter,
where Internet junkies post really short answers to the question,
“What’s happening?”
Not much, if you’ve got time enough to Twitter, I thought going
in. Who would even want to admit it?
Political candidates Twitter to tell the world how great they
are and ask for money. All the California gubernatorial candidates
are on the Twitter list of political tweets. Jerry Brown’s tweets,
which are what Twitter messages are called, link to his campaign
website where he complains about Meg Whitman’s money and asks me to
send him some.
“Will you get 10 of your friends to give $10 to my campaign?
”
I don’t think so. Tweeting for money? Is this the new economy?
Cyber panhandling?
4th District Supervisor Paul Kelley tweets as president of the
Association of California Water Agencies. He compares water prices
and advocates for the state water bond that’s on the November
ballot.
Efren Carrillo tweets about his job as 5th District Supervisor.
As a fellow Twitterer, I can see who Carrillo follows: news media,
Smartrain, other local elected officials, including Healdsburg City
Councilman Mike McGuire, who Carrillo endorsed for 4th District
Supervisor last week.
“Huge news and we are so grateful,” McGuire tweeted.
Both McGuire and his rival Debora Fudge in the 4th District
Supervisor’s race this year say they’re using Twitter as part of
their campaign strategies, which may be a first in Sonoma County
politics.
You have to wonder about the value of a free medium that holds
such strong appeal to political candidates and anyone else vying
for attention. On the other hand, what may be Twitter’s biggest
appeal is that you can sneak around and peek in on people. Twitter
gives you “the superior strength everyone wants, the power to read
people’s thoughts and the ability to overhear conversations as if
you were a fly on the wall,” say Tim O’Reilly and Sarah Milstein,
who co-wrote “The Twitter Book” published last year by O’Reilly
Media, Tim O’Reilly’s Sebastopol-based company.
Eavesdropping! Lurking and spying from the comfort of your own
home! All that, and you can tell your friends what you’re having
for lunch. What’s not to like?
“Do you Tweet?” I asked a Guerneville business man I was talking
to last week on the telephone.
“I don’t,” he said, but he knew what I was talking about.
“It’s basically stuff like ‘I just had a nice cheeseburger at
Pat’s Restaurant,’” he said.“There’s just so much I want people to
know about me. I mean how much can you take?”
That may be the key question for social media. As Twitter
catches on, a lot of people are wondering what it’s good for.
“Ambient intimacy,” says “The Twitter Book.” Although most of
the messages people send on Twitter have been categorized as
“pointless babble,” people using Twitter “have found that becoming
aware of what your friends, family and colleagues are doing leads
to a lightweight but meaningful intimacy,” according to O’Reilly
and Milstein. “Scientists refer to this phenomenon as
‘co-presence,’ or the sense of being with others.”
By the end of 2007, about 500,000 tweets per quarter were
posted, according to Wikipedia. By the end of 2008, 100 million
tweets per quarter were posted. “By the end of 2009, two billion
tweets per quarter were posted,”said Wikipedia. “In the first
quarter of 2010, four billion tweets per quarter were posted.”
The original Twitter question that users tried to answer was
“What are you doing?” Responses were as personal, glib and trivial
as the limited space, 140 keyboard characters, allowed. “Eating a
sandwich” is not an unusual tweet, which can be a couple of dozen
words long, maybe more if you’re fluent in texting, the cell-phone
shorthand in which “you” is “u,” “cr8” means “create” and “CWOT”
stands for “complete waste of time,” a reference on Twitter that
may include any activity other than tweeting, and parties.
“Twitter asks ‘What’s happening?’ and makes the answer spread
across the globe to millions, immediately,” says the Twitter
website.
Immediately is nice. I appreciate it in social situations such
as getting a seat in a restaurant. But it may be a nuisance when
you get a tweet and feel as though you’re expected to drop
everything and respond to your followers, the people who receive
your tweets.
In my case, my pace for getting back to people sometimes
requires intervals of a week or two. The idea of being connected to
a whole bunch of people I may not even know, all the time, seems
like part of some deeper realm of Dante’s Inferno.
“What’s happening” to me is why I keep a notebook, a journal
that I try to make notes in everyday. They may be brief jottings
about the weather and how I feel and what errands I should run.
It’s never occurred to me to send these notes out to the rest of
the world, but on Twitter that’s what you can do.
Maybe this is like an introvert-extrovert deal. Shy rather than
outgoing. A writer named Deanna Zandt has a new book coming out
called “Share This” about social networking that makes a
distinction between “hoarding” and “sharing” personal information.
She’s on the sharing side. What are you doing? We’re all dying to
know.
Twitter has already given me some ideas for other social media
platforms that I’m sure are probably already established. Such as
“Mutter,” where people can briefly respond to the question: What’s
your problem?
“Dither.” Question: Yes? No? Maybe?
“Jitter.” Question: Why are you so nervous?
How the name Twitter came to be is explained very well on
Wikipedia: “The working name was just “Status” for a while,” said
Jack Dorsey, who helped found Twitter in 2006.
“It actually didn’t have a name. We were trying to name it, and
mobile was a big aspect of the product early on … We liked the SMS
aspect, and how you could update from anywhere and receive from
anywhere.
We wanted to capture that in the name — we wanted to capture
that feeling: the physical sensation that you’re buzzing your
friend’s pocket. It’s like buzzing all over the world. So we did a
bunch of name-storming, and we came up with the word “twitch,”
because the phone kind of vibrates when it moves. But “twitch” is
not a good product name because it doesn’t bring up the right
imagery. So we looked in the dictionary for words around it, and we
came across the word “twitter,” and it was just perfect. The
definition was ‘a short burst of inconsequential information,’ and
‘chirps from birds.’ And that’s exactly what the product was.”
They held the first Twitter convention in San Francisco last
week, a gathering at the Palace of Fine Arts and at Fort Mason. You
could watch it live on your laptop.
A Twitter spokesman, Ryan Sarver, whose title is director of
platform, talked about metadata, urged developers to think big and
said Twitter offers “tons of opportunity.”
A musician, Will.I.Am of the
Black Eyed Peas talked about using worldwide fan feedback on
Twitter to help plan the band’s tours. The Twitter conference was
called “Chirp.”
After all the celebration of Twitter’s online potential, it
seemed a little retro that they would do an actual get-together
with people in the same room. Maybe the important thing is that
afterwards they held a big party. That’s one thing you can’t do
online.
