My Tweets, let me show them to you!

So I haven't had a blog entry since January 6th, eh? Wow, I am a huge blogging slacker. It made me wonder why I haven't felt like blogging. It's not for lack of stuff going on or interesting things to talk about. Nor is it that I have nothing to say.

The trouble, as it were, is Twitter. And my iPhone. Ok, the TWO problems are Twitter, my iPhone, and ubiquitous wireless Internet. No, among my problems are such elements as Twitter, my iPhone, ubiquitous wireless Internet, and...I'll come in again.

*Ahem*

For those not in the know, Twitter is what I call YASNS (Yet Another Social-Networking Site). Usually I'm not big fans of social-networking sites beyond a passing interest. I never joined MySpace, I had a FaceBook account back when it was strictly college students and rarely use it now, and I can't even remember my LinkedIn password.

Twitter is something I knew about, but I never really got into until last year when I got the iPhone. My old phone had "Internet", if you can call the crappy pay-by-the-KB T-Mobile portal that you could go to on your phone the Internet. But when I got the iPhone, suddenly I had high-speed, REAL Internet access in my pocket, everywhere I went. I could get my e-mail, check news sites, read webcomics, you name it. It was quite exciting. Even more exciting since I hate text messaging, and I never used it on my old phone. Any way I can type a message without using SMS, I'll take it.

I'm not sure what my aversion to texting is. Maybe because I never had a phone that was easy to type messages, or that I had to pay a fee for every message (both incoming and outgoing). Either way, it was simply unpleasant. I preferred e-mail, or some sort of chat program.

I decided to start using Twitter mainly because my work system blocks Gmail Chat, and I missed being able to chat with people (like Jen) while at work. With Twitter, I can talk to people anywhere without restrictions. It's not quite chat, but it's much quicker than e-mail (usually), and it has the benefit of the social network aspect in that questions or comments made can be seen by all, so others can chime in and have conversations. It is, at it's most basic level, micro-blogging. A message is posted on Twitter (blog entry), others see that message and reply (comment). The beauty of this system is that because the entries as so short (140 chars), and you can set it up to only see posts from your friends, it provides a really quick way to communicate in a casual fashion without the overhead of sending mass text messages, e-mail chains, or blogging.

One of the negatives I've heard about Twitter (and social networking in general) is that your "friends" on these sites are not really your friends. "Real" friends would just call you and see how you are doing, rather than just sending a 140 character message into the ether. But that totally misses the point. Of course most of the people on my "friends list" (or in Twitterese, people I "follow") are not real friends. They are simply people that I find interesting (authors, actors, journalists, techies, etc.), and I like to see what they are up to. Many of them use Twitter as a way of communicating with their fanbase, and they make announcements or post links to interesting stuff that they are involved with. In one sense, Twitter is something like a real-time Google Reader in that it consolidates separate information sources into one stream that you can configure and consume at your leisure. It lets you know what everyone that you like to know about is up to, and in many cases even lets you communicate directly with someone that you might not otherwise ever have any contact with. There are a few people I follow that I met randomly through Twitter that I find amusing and enjoy the occasional short conversations with, but I don't think of them as "friends" in the "get invited to their daughter's wedding" kind of way.

Then there are my actual friends that I follow on Twitter. People that I talk to in meatspace, hang out with, have actual connections with, etc. People like Jen (@ataleof2monkeys), Josh (@schlizzag), Ben (@hbi2k), Brad (@BradIsBest), Jeff(@Homebrew_Magic), or Bryce (@Bingo_TC). What I take offense to is the notion that just because I talk to these people on Twitter, they're not really friends. Look, many of my friends live in other cities. Some in other states. We're spread out and if all we had was the telephone to communicate, we probably wouldn't nearly as much. Twitter allows you to talk to someone directly if you want (direct message), but usually you just send a message with their username at the beginning (@-reply), and you know that it's a message directed at a specific person. That person replies to you, maybe someone jumps in, and soon you have a whole thread of conversation going that is just so much harder to set up with any other system.

Which leads me to the original point of this post. My blogging frequency has declined as my Twitter usage has increased. Because many times I can say what I want on Twitter, and get it out to all the people that I know might actually care much faster than if I wrote it in my blog. Of course, there are still a few stubborn holdouts to joining Twitter (*cough* Meghan! Mel! *cough*). I really wish they would join because sometimes I feel like they are missing out. But hey, Twitter is not for everyone. I still read blogs and leave comments (and I just now discovered that LiveJournal lets you use your OpenID!), but outside of the occasional long post like this one, Twitter is where I do most of my online rambling and commenting these days.

So that's my little shtick on Twitter. I recommend just giving it a try for a few weeks (and getting it on your phone if you can, makes a world of difference), and see how you like it. If you find it lame, stop using it. Hell, Josh was the first person on Twitter and for 2 years, he was "At work" :-P Can't be any lamer then that!

You can follow me on Twitter if you like: @SQUIDwarrior