People often ask me, either directly or through the vitriolic gauntlets they throw down as derogatory posts to blogs, why I like Twitter. Certainly, it isn’t for theirs reliable servers. I gave up on using IM to post my tweets sometime in the first week. To be fair, that is mostly due to the excellent desktop tool for Macs called Twitterrific. With that, I get timely alerts to my friends’ tweets and easy access to an interface to post in my own moments to pause. But I haven’t had the same luck with other interfaces, such as the Twitter application for Facebook (always several Tweets behind) and TwitBin (some difficulties keeping my account information). Still, as you can see from the sample screen shots of the main site’s down time, at least this startup has a sense of humor about it.
Twitter made good use of a plasma screen at South by Southwest conference in 2007.
Twitter’s meteoric rise got a big boost from the South by Southwest conference this past spring, featuring a large plasma display of all of the attendees tweets and an award. Still, there were detractors right from the start. There is also competition. Veronica Belmont spends three minutes conducting a prizefight between Twitter and Jaiku, a latecomer with some strong similarities and a few advantages. Jaiku has a much smaller community but they’ve had channels from the start and a really nice visualization of the public stream.
Jaiku uses a world map to place the stream of mini-blog posts in context.
Both of them are picking up on the older practice of using creative status messages for IM accounts and Facebook. In fact, an Adium-Twitter mashup ties my tweets into GTalk, which in turn alerts a few friends who don’t even have a Twitter account. For all of it’s problems at times, Twitter wins in my book because of an active community development that is quickly integrating the medium with other Web 2.0 tools. As a concept in general, the status update is distinct from blogging, email or chat … but that’s an insight you may only get if you start to figure out how your tweets and those of your friends can seamlessly fit into your day.
The number one reason Twitter is the new black: Steven Wright. If there were ever a man made to use this tool, it is the king of dry one-liners. I’d be surprised if the person behind this Twitter account isn’t the real comedian, but then again, does it matter? The daily tweets are old, but only because he Wright did all his work before the technology caught up with his style.
Tweet.
