The Obligatory Blog
I signed up for Twitter way back in 2008 when it first started widely recognised. I posted maybe a couple dozen times over the next 6 months, and then got bored. Since then I've just been puzzled by people's enthusiasm for it.
Last week though I read a blog by John O'Nolan that explained how he'd picked up a big client (Virgin) through Twitter. This piqued my interest and I decided maybe Twitter's worth another look after all.
And to be honest, I'm kind of getting it now. This morning I made a couple of Tweets about working with Cartthrob, a new shopping cart application for Expression Engine and later in the day had a reply from the guys at Cartthrob.
Where I'd mis-judged Twitter before (and it's still a failure to be using it this way I feel), is the users who don't really say anything in their Tweets, other than posting a link to a new web page. I'd been guilty of this myself originally, and I feel it goes against the spirit of Twitter. I don't want to use it as a kind of RSS feed of site updates from the people I'm following - if I'm looking at my Twitter account, I don't want to be constantly pulled off to go and look at someone's web pages. I want 140 characters of readable text and only provide a link in support of the Tweet, not as the reason for the Tweet.
Where I'm convinced by it, is the community usage with back and forth conversations. The one-way broadcasts (particularly coming from companies with an agenda to promote) seem to be flattening the whole experience.
Another blog post from John Cowen - a web designer in Exeter working under the name Mekonta. If you liked this article, subscribe.
