The Wise Curve

Does Twitter really improve our life?

I started to use Twitter a few months ago after KCLau sent me an invitation to join this fancy sounding website. As a curious guy, I play around with my Twitter (not with my birdie, please!), explore the social network and try to learn everything about this interesting stuff. Maybe now is the suitable moment for me to write what I think of this popular web 2.0 toy.

Twitter is the most well known micro blogging website with the feature of social networking. There are hundreds of other similar websites such as jaiku and other Chinese clones roaming around in the internet. With all the media hype and high profile hoo-ha, Twitter really seems to be a phenomenon. Is Twitter really the next big thing? Or is it just another overrated junk website? Does it really help to improve our life and prosper societies?

Not everyone thinks Twitter is wonderful. Sheylara is not so impressed with it, thinks that it is not a nice platform for creative expression and does not see the point of random mundane micro posts, such as reporting to friends how many times the poster farts a day. She also relates Twitter to the ego-culture. You can read about it here.

I think Sheylara does have a point, but it would be too simplistic to perceive Twitter this way, since Twitter is more than mundane mini blogging. Before we go further, I think it is best to understand more about micro blogging (I will just call it twitting, so that I can type less), and its comparison to normal blogging.

A post made in Twitter (I will call it a twit) is very short, typically with just 140 characters or less. You have to cram your message into a compact summary to twit. You can’t add picture or video but you can put a hyperlink. This means a twit can be created very easily, with little time and effort. The spread of message is highly virulent. A twit is spread to the subscribers (or followers) via many routes, such as SMS, RSS, instant messenger, websites and other applications. Maybe it is the most efficient way of information transfer in internet.

A normal blog post requires much more effort and time to create. The spread of information through blog is slower compare to twits. Some people might argue that we can replace twits with blog by posting one-sentence blog posts. This is a nice idea, but most likely the author will lose his readers. Blogs with many one-sentence posts are not deliciously readable, except in a few rare cases.

As an analogy, Twits are like pencil drawings of simple emoticons. They are easily drawn, and quickly spread around to other people, in the form of paper message. A blog post is like an oil painting, which requires time and effort to produce. Oil paintings can’t be displayed around easily like paper messages, and we can only enjoy these paintings at art gallery.

It also takes the reader much less time to read the information on twit than blog.

I think twitting can effectively reduce the severity of information overload. For me, it is nicer to receive updates in a few words and a hyper link (for example, link to blog), than say, a whole sea of words for my eyes to swim around to read them. The information transfer in twit is simply sleek, simple, and saves resources.

Sometimes the poster is very busy or not in the right mood to blog. Twitting offers the poster a much faster and easier way to express his message. When I was writing my thesis, I really did not have the mood and time to update my blog. At that time, I twitted a lot. Expressing a little is better than not expressing at all. Of course blog has its own advantage, where messages are expressed in a much richer and interactive manner, something that is not offered by twitting.

Both twitting and blogging have their own advantages and disadvantages. It is best to exploit the best of both worlds by using both of these tools together as power combo. Blog can be used to write about its core theme, while twits can be placed at the sidebar to display some tiny tidbits or short posts not related to the blog’s core theme. Twits help to keep the blog relevant, as the blogger does not need to digress to short, irrelevant rant and rave of daily lives on his blog post. Looks like blog and twits can live happily together after all! Bravo!

There are some organizations and companies that exploit the rapid information spreading feature of twitters by providing their feeds through twits. This makes Twitter function like a RSS reader. Last time I followed the twits by BBC, CNN, Science channel, health channel etc. Very quickly I learned that I am getting information overload on Twitter. The whole Twitter page was full with feeds from them. I have to unsubscribe most of the feeds. Why use Twitter as feed reader, when we already have RSS?

There are quite a number of information providers that are not available in RSS world. They lurk around on Twitter and are precious gems. I use both RSS and Twitter to cover the information needed. Twitter can be a great side kick of RSS in feed reading!

Another important feature of Twitter is its social networking. I am sure that you are familiar with how social network works, just like in Facebook, Friendster or Myspace. You can meet (or stalk) new friends in the virtual world through such networks. I think the network effect of Twitter is not large enough to function well, at least for Malaysians and Singaporeans. At the time of writing this post, there are only about 2000 Malaysians, and 3500 Singaporean Twitter users, who openly display their locations. Not all of them are active. Luckily, I manage to find some interesting bloggers via Twitter’s social network. Maybe Sheylara didn’t expect to get her new readers (and stalkers) through Twitter.

In conclusion, Twitter can effectively serve as a fast and simple route for information transfer, an easy way for busy people to express themselves, a way to meet new friends through social network, and a platform to receive short updates from various organizations. It is a nice feature that will enrich the world of web 2.0.

I think it is still early to judge whether Twitter will improve our life or not. It is a new feature, taking its own baby steps to its evolution. I am sad that it is standing on a shaky foundation, as it faces a lot of technical problems. Twitter users see the fail whale quite often. Sometimes some followers or features disappear temporary, which can be a frustrating experience. How Twitter will affect the internet and our life depends a lot on how netizens use this tool and its survival against endless technical problems. I hope it will not get crushed by the fail whale.

Tiny Tidbit:

Yesterday I asked ZhaoMing for his opinion on Twitter. He has not tried it yet, but I think his response is worth a mention here:

Relax:

have u tried twitter already?

 

ZhaoMing:
nope… man.. there’s just so many things to try….
i am happy with my blog, msn and 2 email addresses

 

Relax:

how to convince u to try it?

 

ZhaoMing:
it’s just a trend which will be forgotten over time
just like recom.org, or mIRC, or ICQ
man.. i am tired of trying things which won last

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Thanks Qiaoyun for the funny joker spoof video.

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