All a Twitter
Twitter is three things:
- Really fast platform-agnostic publishing (browser, SMS, IM, etc)
- Yet another ‘friend’ collecting site
- Yet another centralized, free, publishing service
- Slow, almost to the point of unusable
As you can see from my list, I’m only excited about the first one (inspiring the qspress script). I’d love for you to receive the posts at this or any of my blogs however you’d like - browser, voice mail, text message, IM, email. And I think the character-limits should be placed on the receiving end, not on the publishing end. This platform-agnostic publishing is why the NYTimes and other TwitterRivers Dave Winer is working on are interesting.
So, no, I don’t want another place to publish (another account to remember, another cms to learn, etc), but I do want my writing to be wherever you want to read it. It’d be great to extend the TwitterRiver notion and send any Twitter-originated comments back to the original blog post.
All that said, yes, I do have a Twitter account. Feel free to follow me.
Lastly, a tip for following the Twitter buzz @ Technorati: if you can replace ‘weblog’ for ‘twitter’ in any ‘twitter sucks’ article and it still holds, the author missed the point.
4 Comments
Ummm…
Really, why do we need this? Who wants to sit there and type in what they’re doing all day long? Don’t we have enough distractions what with RSS aggregators, IM, E-mail, personal home pages, blogs, etc?
We live in a time of cultural overproduction. I don’t need to know what my friends are doing at every moment of the day. They don’t need to know what I’m doing. I am always contactable… if not by email then IM, if not by IM then by phone. Really, the only times I’m NOT contactable I don’t want to be contacted anyway (in the bathroom, interviewing users, or moderating a usability test).
Maybe I’ve just become old and my brain has reached its capacity for understanding (and being excited by) technology, but this looks like a horrendous waste of time to me. I probably just don’t get it.
Alright, rant over. Time to go soak my dentures in lye…
@Fred
There are some very compelling contexts where something like Twitter is hugely valuable (think coordinating groups in real-time). There’s also huge value in platform-agnostic publishing (the core of Twitter) for both publishing and receiving. Let’s say I prefer publishing via browser, but you prefer publishing via email, and Joe prefers reading via his phone. Sounds like a win-win-win for everyone.
As Dave reminds us, our filters for context and relevance have yet to catch up to our post-scarcity world.
What is “platform-agnostic publishing” in English? Why is it so valuable? I can see having a feature of blogging software or something like that that allows you to post by IM or SMS, but why a whole site dedicated to this? Isn’t this just a hyper-sped-up, intensely boring blog?
I’ll give you the “coordinating groups in real time” argument, with only a brief snarky mention of flash mobs and Finnish teenagers who’ve been doing this for years with just their phones.
Platform-agnostic publishing:
I like publishing via browser
You like publishing via email
Dave likes publishing via his phone
Jill likes publishing via IM
Then on the flip-side:
I like reading via RSS aggregator
You like reading via email
Dave likes reading via browser
Jill likes reading via phone
Now, that removes the publication from the constraint of a specific delivery method and allows everyone to publish and read in whichever form they like bestest.