I like the Twitter a lot. I live-Twittered 109 college basketball games last season, and I've even created several Twitter robots. One of them has sports scores from America, and another one has soccer results from places that are not America. I even made a special robot that tells me what the weather's going to be today where I live. I like Twitter so much I own a Fail Whale t-shirt to help support the artist who drew it. I've been on Twitter long enough that my KyleWhale avatar is usually somewhere near the top of follower lists ranked by tenure. In that time, I've defined my relationship to Twitter, as one must eventually do with any technology, and I've made my decisions about what it is.
Millions of other people have made that decision for themselves, too. Twitter is telegrams without the news, a ball-point pen, a subway platform conversation, maybe even the second coming of the telephone itself. Twitter challenges creative folks to shoehorn big thoughts into 140 characters, and it's a way for others to consume celebrity culture in unprecedented ways. What's fascinating to me is that such a uncomplicated data construct is capable of being so many different things to so many different people.
Twitter doesn't force you to accept its terms of existence like other social networks do, doesn't impose a rigid and strange framework on participants. In real life, a "follower" relationship -- in which one is interested in what another has to say -- is far more common than the double-bound "friend" tie that Facebook and MySpace insist upon. You can talk to everybody who's "following"... or if you want to address one person, there are ways to do that, both semi-publicly and privately. Of course, you don't have to use Twitter for talking at all.
That CNN's breaking news feed has over 1.1 million followers proves that Twitter is much more than the chirpy teenage party many critics think it is. The 140-character limit is just enough to fit a headline and an invitation (in the form of a compressed link) to the whole story. That fits in well on top of the headline/lead-paragraph/trailing-details format taught in beginning journalism classes; it also delivers on an early internet promise that the news would come to you, and that you wouldn't have to make any effort unless you were interested in learning more.
Twitter's simplicity, and resultant extensibility, are about as close to beauty as I've seen in the electronic world. Any internet device capable of data entry is an entry point, and information retrieval options increase every day. If you'd like, you can output to your calendar and turn a Twitter feed into a running diary. If you're a BlackBerry owner, you can redirect your incoming messages into your inbox. Every user defines their own relationship to it.
Mine is rather easy. I use Twitter the same way that one would use a mailbox, or an RSS newsreader, or a Google search: as a filter against the 99.99999999 percent of available information that I don't want. I have a few news sources for stuff I'm interested in, and "follow" the 15 or so people I'm actual friends with (I treat "I had soup for lunch" as "[ping] I'm alive and okay"). I understand that some "follow" hundreds of feeds from people they don't know in efforts to be polite netizens, but that seems to render the whole idea of a timeline useless. However, that's their version of Twitter, everyone has their own.
So I don't find the ongoing and growing debate on Twitter's usefulness very interesting. It's as useful as one's imagination will let it be. But whenever that Fail Whale pops up on the screen, with its "Too many tweets!" message, it reminds me that despite its simplicity on the far side of complexity, nobody's found a way to have this pay for itself yet. I just hope that solution ends up being as simple as all the others Twitter's solved.
