[Update: Amusingly, Twitter's been very unhappy since I posted this, and suggesting it's in the midst of a meltdown wouldn't be out of line...]
You can’t help but hear the drumbeats about Twitter. Depending on who’s talking, it’s either a colossal waste of time, or humanity’s last, greatest hope.
I’ve used Twitter for months now as a simple micro-blogging sidebar on my Trout Underground fly fishing blog. In that relatively undemanding capacity (and helped along by Alex King’s excellent Twitter Tools), it worked fine, though hardly perfectly.
Recently I tumbled for a personal Twitter account to see about all the fuss.
Well, I tried to see.
Seems like the service is down a lot. In fact, as I write this — having just shipped a messaging platform advocating a radical repositioning of a client’s product (something I was willing to crow about) — I can’t log on.
Can’t tweet. Can’t do anything. (I wrote this yesterday. Today — right now — we seem to be experiencing another temporary outage).
While not everything about Twitter is trivial, it’s clear that most tweets aren’t exactly life-changing, which is precisely why the service needs to work flawlessly.
The Experiment Continues
Still, I’m going to continue the Twitter experiment.
You can find me there hiding behind a ChandlerWrites address.
I invite you to follow along, and I promise not to clog the pipelines with “shorts or sweatpants?” subject matter.
After all, I initially “followed” a lot of people in an attempt to quickly gain perspective. And the noise level was… high. Too high.
I find Twitter an interesting idea. Perhaps once I’m following the right people, the light bulb will come on. And regardless of of whether it sticks, you have to do these things to speak about them with your clients.
Still, Twitter feels more like a proof of concept — a proving ground for something better that has yet to evolve.
Keep writing, Tom Chandler.
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