Twitter-dee, Twitter-dum

At the recommendation of my friend, Randy Elrod, I decided to start “twittering.” I have now been engaging in the practice for about a week.

What is twittering? Twitter’s home page says it best:

Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

Twittering (who knew that was a verb, let alone a gerund?!) requires very little time. For starters, you can only enter 140 characters at a time. This means that you must post very short, direct-to-the-point messages. In practice, this means that, as a twitterer (who knew that was a noun?!), you update several times a day, but it takes almost no time at all. I do most of it from my iPhone.

So what's the advantage? So far, I think there are four:

1. It allows family, friends, and others to follow your activity throughout the day and keep up with your life. You can even get these updates via your cell phone, as a text message. It's kind of like the Truman Show meets instant messaging.
   
   
2. It allows you to meet new friends, who tend to be on the cutting edge of technology. I am following several people that I would have never met otherwise. These are relationships—or potential relationships—that may prove very fruitful for the future. We’ll see.
   
   
3. It allows me to experience first-hand a new technology that almost 1 million people are using. It may be a complete waste of time but it is free and the investment of time is miniscule.
   
   
4. It allows me to think consciously about my life. What am I doing now? What kind of story is my life telling? Is this really what I want to be doing? Could I—should I—be choosing something different?

I don’t know if twittering will become a long-term habit. Knowing me, I will eventually get bored with it. But, for now, I am enjoying the experience. I have committed to trying it for 30 days.

If you want to “follow me,” you can do do my joining Twitter.com and officially following me. Just sign up and follow the directions. It’s pretty simple. Or you can follow me on Facebook or on the right sidebar of my blog. Twitter is updating both.

Comments

[Spence Smith]

Perfect. probably the clearest explanation of what we have been doing on twitter. My friends give me funny looks whe i tell them i twitter...as they should...i guess.

[Colleen Coble]

I'd heard the term, but I didn't know what it was. I'd intended to figure it out when I had time. I'll check it out, Mike!

[CAL]

I understand your list of possible benefits here and can find some validity in them. Though I can't help but wonder if Twitter does more to feed our culture's proclivity to narcissism than it functionally improves our lives. I have the same question about Facebook , MySpace, Virb, Last.fm, etc. For many folks, in the end, it appears to be all about me, me, me.

Like anything, I'm sure Twitter can be used to a positive effect---and you've put forth some ideas on how to do that here. But my overall feeling is that technologies like these do more harm than good, especially to the younger generations growing up nursing at the Internet's teat. For all our talk about connectedness via such applications, I wonder if they teach us to focus too much on ourselves and so isolate us from living in true community: where we serve and think of others more often and more highly than ourselves; where we follow St. John the Baptist's example and seek to decrease, dying to ourselves; where we pour out our lives for the sake of others, like Christ.

Maybe I'm overthinking it. But I wonder if we spend too little time thinking about who's steering the ship and where it's all taking us.

[Scott Winter]

Mike -

I started "twittering" this week too. I'm still not sure the benefits, but I also linked the updates to Facebook and so far no one has either complained or encouraged.

Overall I think it's fun, just like any other social networking. I disagree with Cal that it is narcissistic, but I do think that it is extremely voyeuristic. My chief concern is how the information could potentially be used (I wrote a little bit about it on my blog), otherwise I agree with all of your benefit points.

Twitter on!

[Michael Hyatt]

Cal,

You may be right; I'm not sure. Certainly, we need to apply some critical thinking here. However, it seems to me that my focus is other-centered—on the people I am following rather than the other way around. It may be voyeuristic, as Scott pointed out, but it could also help me keep up with my friends and, as a result, be a better friend to them. Just a thought.

Mike

[Bob D]

Mike,

How does this constant conversation via Twitter fit into the other goal you celebrated not long ago, namely, checking email just twice a day in order to have large blocks of time to focus, think and work? Seems to me that when folks Twitter they actually fritter away precious time that could be spent reflecting on more Big Picture, long term thinking.

[Michael Hyatt]

Bob,

This is an experiment. You may be right. I may come to that conclusion. We'll see. Right now, I'm enjoying it. (I like learning new stuff.)

Mike

[Kyle Chowning]

Mike. I've recently picked up Twittering as well. However, I've wondered if it was "worth" my time. Something about knowing that the Pres & CEO of a major company is doing it, validates my interest and curiosity. Thanks for the validation. Maybe I'll come to the same conclusions as you do.

[CAL]

Just to clarify, I didn't say that twittering itself is narcissistic. And certainly Facebook, MySpace, et al, don't have to be either. I didn't mean to insinuate that you, Mike, or anybody else is too self-focused because of using such communication "tools." I only meant to take a step back and wonder--looking at the greater whole--if such technologies ultimately subvert or feed that tendency. My bet is on the latter, but I could be wrong. Time well tell.

Is our culture uniformly narcissistic? Of course not. Are all Twitter users egomaniacs? Absolutely not. Could Facebook help me be a better friend? Yeah, sure it could. My previous statement was more pontification and wonder than anything else.

I do think it's wise, however, to look from a macro view and employ our imaginations in discerning where all this is taking us. It's a good thing to do before blindly accepting any new development or technology. This is, perhaps, something we have done too little of in the last century or two.

[JAVA4ALL]

Like any tool, Twitter is only as useful and productive as the person who uses it: you can bang your thumb with the hammer or you can build a house.

Two great illustrations of how Twitter-power has been used for good and not evil can be tracked from the URL's below.

The first is Schofield of The Guardian discussing how Twitter was so useful at the annual SWSX music festival in Austin, Texas this year, it could actually change what performances people attended, changing people mid-step in their direction. SWSX even provided a special screen just so people could track comments on the performances, who liked what or didn't, etc.

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/technology/archives/2007/03/11/twitter_crowd_goes_bananas_at_sxsw.html

In the second URL, Jeff Jarvis of Buzzmachine.com discusses how Comcast's undoing may be thanks to Twitterers who are fed up with the company's pitiful performance and are communicating their service issues en masse and in real time -- no way now for Comcast to sweep the dirt under the rug:

http://www.buzzmachine.com/2008/04/06/one-person-you-dont-want-to-piss-off/

Likewise, there are some less some wonderful examples, too, one that almost reflects a lynch mob mentality. When a panel moderator at SWSX was deemed "too soft" on a certain celebrity, some Twitterers might as well have been cinching a gossip-tronic noose around her neck.

[Eric S. Mueller]

Michael, I notice you're still using your iPhone. I remember last year you posted about some disadvantages of using an iPhone for business. I took my iPaq 6945 on a business trip last week and hit some major limitations, a big one being battery life. I used my supervisor's iPhone to fill out my timecard before a meeting when my Windows Mobile phone wouldn't render the Deltek application correctly.

Would you mind posting an update about your professional level use of the iPhone? Have you found workarounds for your complaints, or just accepted the limitations?

[Colleen Coble]

I am loving watching what you're up to, Mike! I was praying for you and the rest of the team this morning as you went on your marathon and I had a place to come to keep track of how it was going. :-)

[J.]

Have you ever tried talking to yourself? Out loud? Without a computer? It is much the same effect, only people tend to think you are crazy. However, it is useful in the same way, I think, as twittering---but probably less interesting to a true techno geek.

[Michael Hyatt]

"Techno Geek"? Guilty as charged. ;-)