Archive News
Twitter has its merits Ð pity about the name
Date Published: {J}
How are your hostages doing? You just have to feed them and give them water and stuff, it isn’t hard. And yet I killed a few hostages this year. Getting a driving licence for example.
Getting more exercise too. Though on the bright side, those pretty much cancel each other out. I didn’t really get a single thing I planned to do in 2009 done – but on the other hand I did do a lot of things I didn’t. I learned to row a boat this year.
Trivial perhaps, but great too. I learned how to use a sauna – a real, wood-fired one. I learned a lot of good exercises for the spine – the back pain I was getting last year is entirely gone now. (All right, I injured my coccyx and now it hurts to sit down, but that’s completely unrelated.)
I got to spend a lot of time with small children and eventually realised that I should stop thinking about how to talk to them and just talk to them.
These are things I didn’t expect to learn this year. But enough of me.
What was 2009 for the rest of the world – what was it the year of? Obama presidency. Lisbon Treaty. Swine flu.
Important things happened, the world changed in a lot of ways. Yet I think the biggest thing of 2009 was Twitter. Social networking systems in general reached critical mass, but it’s Twitter that fascinates me most. Not least, because it seems inexplicable.
Why would someone want to send a message no longer than a text to a web page? You can already send text messages to your friends, and those have the advantage of being private. You can already publish things on the web, and that doesn’t have a 142-character limit.
Twitter seems to combine the worst features of both. I freely admit I didn’t get it when it first came out in 2007, but I wasn’t doing it right. I was sending Twitter messages (‘tweeting’) from my phone, but receiving them on it too.
So the apparent benefit was getting pointless and frequently inane messages from friends around the world, at all times of day and night. This quickly became irritating, and I wrote it off.
But as Twitter grew, the way people used it evolved. The genius of the shortness became apparent. Sure, anyone can write a blog. But who’s going to read it? I rarely bother to read Livejournal posts if they go beyond a paragraph, even when they’re by friends who write entertaining and hilarious stuff.
But I will voraciously read short messages. You can take them in almost at a glance, and the next one could be something good. (Interesting thing to note is that though you can make posts as long as you like on Facebook, people tend not to.
More and more it’s morphing into an (overcomplicated) rival to Twitter.)
It’s become a place where you can make a remark that your friends may be interested in, or crack a joke, or let people know your plans – a universal message board. This was one of the very first uses of computer networks of course, but in 2009 it finally became part of everyday life.
Shame about the obligatory stupid name.