It’s been about a month since I dipped my toe in the Twittery waters and I still don’t quite know what to make of it. Statistics tell me that traffic to my personal Web properties has increased rather dramatically. That’s a good thing, right?
I should mention that I quickly learned that there’s little/no restriction on creating new IDs, and it’s very useful to do that in order to experiment with stuff. It’s nice that they allow you delete your ID, too, so if you play that way it’s just nice to clean up when you’re done. That dopey ID you made for testing might be the one someone else is seeking.
So let’s take a look at few Twittery things I’ve noticed, shall we?
Tools Twitter’s API is lots of fun to play with. There’s so much you can do with it and zillions of folks are hard at work trying to figure out how their pet hack can bring them fame, fortune and, yes, money. I’m not at all crazy about the hosted tools that need you to enter your credentials before they’ll function. It’s a trust thing. (Test IDs can come in handy here.)
Advertising Like everywhere else on the Web, everybody’s trying to sell you something. The current worldwide economic climate has spawned a kind of desperation that’s driven some to every imaginable online get-rich-quick scheme. And Twitter’s incredible popularity and growth attracts ’em like poop attracts flies. In fact, there are more Twitter users expounding on how to make money with Twitter than you can shake the proverbial stick at!
Loneliness There’s an air of sadness, loneliness, melancholy. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but it’s definitely there.
Celebrity Lots of celebrities of all levels are on Twitter. Some are even personable and cool. You’ve really gotta take it with a grain of salt, however. Who’s real? Sure, it’s uncool to impersonate, but uncool isn’t a crime. Who’s got staffers writing for them? Who’s just there for shameless self-promotion?
Risk Many tweets include URLs, and most of them have been shrunk to fit the 140-character space using one of the many URL-shortening services. Unless you take steps to preview – and it seems like nobody does – you just don’t know where you’ll end up. And that can be double-plus-ungood. You really need good client-side defenses – you just know you’re gonna end up clicking that link.
Twitter reminds me alot of the CB craze back in the ’70s (when dinosaurs roamed the Earth). This time around, though, you get the fickle tides of Internet trendiness instead of an 11-year sunspot cycle to interrupt the fun. (Internet trendiness is not unlike that surging feeling in your stomach as your Scrambler car changes direction, or the wave pool at Typhoon Lagoon on a hot Wednesday afternoon.) Technically, there’s nothing really new here; all of the technology behind Twitter has been around for quite a while. Doesn’t matter, its popularity is on fire now, and the big question is how it’ll make money. I’m not going to speculate.
I’ll leave you with this cartoon. It’s silly, but it also pretty much sums it up.
More than once I’ve thought to unfollow every single ID that tries to hawk something to me. Trouble is, every now and again most of ’em will actually link to something that’s kind of interesting. I’m damned if I’ve got time to waste sorting ’em out.
I haven’t used the account that’s associated with my company to attempt to generate sales. At the outset I figured it best to watch and learn first. I’ve found so far that much of the ‘marketing’ done on Twitter sort of offends me. In fact, I can honestly say that not once have I felt compelled to do business with anyone I’ve encountered there. I can only conclude that it’s not in my best interest to join that crowd.
On a personal level, I can’t deny the increase in traffic to my sites from Twitter. Or the parallel increase in email traffic, of which a little more than half seems to be spammy. Increased traffic is a plus, so I’m thinking I’ll stick around for that reason alone.
Any way you look at it, you’ve got to admit that was a pretty funny cartoon!
It’s another way to make a lot of meaningless noise. It’s crippled blogging. And it’s melancholy because people with anything better to do, are doing that instead of “Tweeting.”