Why Twitter?: Philosophical, Artistic, and Practical Implications

As a recent and—relatively speaking—moderate twitter user, I agree that there are many trivial tweets going around the twittersphere.

I use twitter for two main reasons:

1. To practice brevity...
My main purpose in blogging is to gain an audience for my writing. The 140 character limit offers me a wonderful challenge. I try to write aphorisms and haiku. I see it as a wonderful creative challenge. As I've written before, twitter offers great creative challenges to writers.

2. To attract more readers to my blog...
The promotional opportunities that twitter offers are tremendous, if for no other reason than for the sheer rate at which anyone can accumulate hordes of followers. This is why I use twitterfeed to feed my blog posts through twitter. It's just another place where people search for things of interest. Who knows, someone might search twitter for an essay on All in the Family.

Notice that neither of my reasons involve wanting to follow others. I do follow a few (relatively speaking) people. I check twitter every day to see if anyone has tweeted anything interesting. I look for like-minded twitterers: people who use it as a challenge to their writing.

It is easy to add people to the list of those you follow with services like twollo but the searches on this sight and on twitter itself are lacking. I'm not a tech-knowledgeable person, but I know that the results I get on twitter and on twitter-related services are not nearly as useful as those on google. I think the former use just keyword, with no preference for popularity of previous results.

My take on the Darwinian implications of twitter (see Paolo Pedercini's "Qwitter, the Darwinian Side of Social Networks" for a more in-depth consideration of this issue on Networked performance and neural.it), twitter's success has sparked all of these parasitic entities—that’s pretty interesting.

I do agree that the temptation to use twitter for meaningless trivial tweets is a very big problem for too many twitterers. I am not above this temptation, although I think I am only guilty of it just once.

I try to use twitter sparingly (again, relatively speaking), so that those who follow me keep doing so and really read what I write. But not everyone on twitter has the same constraint. There's a lot of nonsense out there in the twittersphere and it's hard to find people worth following.

Qwitter (also, see Pedercini's post) reminds us of the need to have purpose in our writing. But as funny as qwitter may be, I don't think it's really informative. There are many reasons why people follow and stop following on twitter and, again, much of this has to do with those compiling services that make it so you can add another 500 people to follow in just a matter of minutes.

Finally, I return to my mantra about all new media: there are no rules and it is the need for breaking the mold in the first place that makes the new media even exist.

For other thoughts on twitter usage see:

Ryan Deal's "10 Users You'll Meet on Twitter"

And whenever I see anything else about twitter, I'll update it on delicious: my twitter label on Delicious