The beauty and shortcomings of microblogging as experienced on Twitter is something Iain Simons would encourage you to try
It seems everyone is twittering, has recently twittered or is about to tweet. Even if they’re not doing it themselves, someone is (or has been) helpfully pretending on their behalf.
With the imminent closure of rival Pownce confirmed this week, the path appears to be clear for Twitter to comfortably secure its place as the microblogging service of choice. Despite one of its defining characteristics being a notorious lack of stability, Twitter seems destined to become a mainstream-nerd-verb.
It’s a service/addiction that has proved to be quite divisive amongst web-users. Whilst it ably demonstrates a capability to generate trivial distractions far greater than the miserly 140 character message limit might suggest, its real beauty and application can often remain hidden.
Few platforms have displayed such durability. In the last year it’s been an amusing conference back-channel, a fan-created extension of a tv fiction, live feed of significant events and, inevitably, lots of novels.
One of the core problems with the service, once you begin to dip your toe in, is the sheer depth of updates that can begin to submerse you.
They don’t call it a firehose of feeds for nothing. But you don’t have to participate in it to appreciate its value as a barometer of global concerns. Twitscoop is a
useful site which you should load up and leave on next to you as you work. Glance across occasionally to see a cloud of trends evolving in front of you. As I write, ‘bank percentage’ and ‘interest lowest level’ are closely trailed by ‘sunrise’. It’s in these sort of moments that the humanity of something like Twitter really shines. A lot of people are thinking how great it is that the sun is coming up.
Twitter isn't *for* any specific thing, which why it can be so intoxicating. In line with a number of other writers I'm going to advocate you try it out and sample some of the fruits of a microblogging community. In the end, the tweet you take is (y'know, roughly) equal to the tweet you make.
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