The majority of my clients and colleagues are using it, but I have not uttered the word until now: TWITTER. I was convinced to break my silence when I saw Time magazine: "How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live."
Here is my version of Time's story: Twitter does to texting what blogging did to email.
So let's get to the root of the matter: Texting. John Cassidy says it better than I can in the October 2008 New Yorker, "Thumbspeak: Is Texting Here to Stay?" Summary of Cassidy: We may be helplessly addicted to crackberries etc, but we are not addicted to typing words with numeric keypads. As soon as we all have QWERTY in our palms, we will then do away with the 140-character barrier and, with that, all the quirks that make txt msgs distinct from emails will quickly die a natural death.
If texting becomes indistinguishable from emailing (grant me that hypothetical just for a moment) how then will Tweeting differ from blogging? I am curious.
[The editor pauses... almost publishes the post... then takes a phone call from a colleague with more Twitter stories. A change of heart occurs.]
No, wait, I have glossed over something fundamental: Timing. Words have rhythm. Even if my version of the Twitter story is technically true (which I think it is), it misses the whole timing thing. That is a big deal, experientially if not technically.
Comments, anyone?
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License and is copyrighted (c) 2009 by Connective Associates LLC except where otherwise noted.
Tuesday, 23 June 2009
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