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WARNING: I love Twitter. I can bore for England on its merits. Tune out now if you don't fancy reading a Twitter sales pitch.
***********************************************************************Gordo, you honestly won't 'get' Twitter until you start to use it and follow a bunch of people/organisations who you have something in common with (e.g. you and I would be perfect friends on Twitter because of our shared interest in early blooming Tyrolean duck cheese). A personal friend (i.e. real life in the flesh touch him feel him) has something like 4000 'tweets' to his name despite only having been on there like me for about 18 months and even he didn't see the point of it at first. Believe me, 4000 is bordering on madness. That guy, he likee, but at the start he was the same as most other people..."What's the point of this then?"
Erm, despite now having a Facebook presence and having been on MySpace for a few years already, I don't use either of them regularly. MySpace from my perspective is very music-centric so I keep in touch with old band mates etc. on there and update my page when I have a gig coming up. I probably go there 6 times a year tops. Facebook I'm new to and set up my page there simply so I could start a Filmwasters group...for the precise reason you allude to; a number of Filmwasters 'faces' seemed to have all but disappeared from the Internet towards the end of last year, but the Filmwasters.com Missing Persons Bureau started receiving reports of them showing up on FB quite regularly. So I thought I'd take the mountain to Mohammed, as it were. FB being what it is I do stop by there on 'personal business' about once a week, but I've made a decision not to play games, install time-consuming apps & join anything I'm invited to....and this is all because I use Twitter for my 'social networking thing' fix.
I prefer Twitter because from a pure functionality perspective it does about 5% of what FB & MySpace do, but it happens to be the 5% that appeals to me. We all know by now how I'm busy & don't have a lot of spare time (drone, drone, drone!!), so the fact that Twitter is so lightweight & easy to use from any number of devices (computer, mobile phone, Internet tablet etc.) means I can join in the fun even if I only have 10 minutes a day to read and post. Hell, I get something out of it even if I only have 2 minutes a day.
A maximum of 140 characters per post is a fantastically liberating feature. People I think see it as a restriction at first, but most here would probably agree that in time it becomes something they like a lot.
But more than that I use my Twitter updates as the source material for a bunch of other sites I have online. I update my FB status automatically via Twitter (which is why there are about 10 posts to my FB profile every day even though I rarely log onto FB itself) and have my Twitter embedded in MySpace & also my band-related personal site,
http://edwenn.com. I also use Twitter as the main source of content on my main blog,
http://edwenn.tumblr.com. I was telling Sean earlier today that the combo of Twitter & Tumblr works really well for me & I'm amazed at how many people stop by and see what I'm up to. Almost none of them will realise that the content they're reading comes from Twitter.
Because the Twitter API is totally open there are a dizzying number of Twitter clients and related apps out there. Another plus. Leave your client of choice running all day on your computer and watch the ticker tape of the - hem - Twitterverse (
sorry about that) scroll past.
For some reason I find Facebook in particular creepy (not too strong a word...it freaks me out), but not Twitter. Twitter is small and simple. Super easy to understand and manage. Things not being creepy are a plus in my book.
Finally, I like it because enough of my friends use it. Like any social networking thingy, you won't enjoy it if you're on your own.
It's not for everyone and if you already waste too much time on Facebook you may not need another web dingdong thingy in your life, but to be honest I never saw it as a time-wasting thing. You don't disappear 'into' or 'on' Twitter like you do with FB....you just use it every now and then.
