"I Don't 'Get' Twitter"
Posted by joe, Tue Sep 25 18:35:00 UTC 2007
If you don't understand what the big deal is with Twitter, you're not alone.
Dick Costolo, creator of FeedBurner (which was purchased by Google for $100 million), didn't "get" Twitter for a while:
I remember the first time I saw Twitter and thought “I don’t get it”, and then somebody explained it to me and I thought “uh-huh. I don’t get it”, and then somebody explained it to me again, and I thought “Ah!... I don’t get it.” Only after I saw somebody using it in a way that I found valuable did I finally get it.
Me too. I'd heard of it for months before I got into it.
What doesn't help is the appearance of its front page. Until you have an account, it is a barrage of everyone's public updates. It was like being a psychic on a crowded subway car.
Even after that initial barrage, it seemed like blogging for people with ADD. Or a series of iChat status messages. Or a publicly-visible train of thought. Or time-delayed IM. (And it sort of is all of those.)
Yet here I am, four months and almost 2,000 updates later.
What was the segue for me? The social aspect. I found friends who used it and started following them. I'm only slightly more interested in what they had for lunch than in total strangers' noshing, but it was a start.
Before long I saw some more interesting things go by. I learned that there is midnight yoga on Capitol Hill and that the Department of Justice makes their employees use a crippled version of Internet Explorer. I saw some cool links. I saw one guy's father passed away and that a friend was interviewed by Fast Company magazine. I started using it as a non-disruptive way to communicate with my girlfriend throughout the day.
So, just have patience. Add a few people you know. Listen to them for a few days. And you'll "get" Twitter soon enough.
I went through a similar process. At first, I wrote Twitter off as another useless social networking "tool," similar to MySpace or Facebook of Friendster. I finally signed up just to see what it was all about, and for a long time I never posted. Then a co-worker signed up. Then another. Then a friend. I started posting more frequently, and so did they. Now I use it to keep up with former colleagues, friends, my wife, and friends of friends. I used to only post when I was really happy or really upset about something, but lately I've starting posting more frequently...not as much as joe, of course. ;)
I recently wrote in response to this very answer.
Twitter for business, defined for those who don’t get it
http://blog.marylandmedia.com/2007/09/twitter-for-business-defined-for-those-who-don%e2%80%99t-get-it/