and now, we tweet
Are you ready for the biggest internet craze that has yet to make money for its founders? For over a year now I have been warning friends against the evils of Twitter, mainly because I had yet to find room in my life for it, couldn’t understand it, and was thus annoyed, slightly bored, and afraid of it. A few months ago, two words changed all of this for me: Christopher Walken.
The sordid tale of the now defunct Christopher Walken Twitter (google those three words if you’re one of the 7 people who didn’t hear about it, or read this) is nothing if not an indicator of the power and popularity of this amazing (albeit still slightly annoying) new tool. Suffice it to say, the CWalken Twitter sucked me in and now I am able to explain the phenomenon to you.
Twitter functions as a mass text, only people must “opt-in” to be able to view it. As such, it’s amazing. You can decide from whom you’d like to receive mass texts, i.e. people you actually know, news sources you trust, organizations you’d like to keep tabs on, etc. Bonus: being limited to 140 characters prevents these joyful bird noises (tweets) from running on into multiple texts which maddeningly clog your sms inbox. The first twitter feed I “followed” was Christopher Walken.
To be a member of Twitter, you are not actually obligated to tweet–if you prefer, you can treat it as a more succinct google reader. This is nice because, quite frankly, most folks do NOT have something worth sharing every hour…or even everyday (unless you are able to write in a style befitting Christopher Walken).
So many of my water cooler conversations of late have centered around “how to use Twitter,” and though I don’t believe we’ve totally figured it out yet, my advice to anyone who asks is this: before you tweet, think “Would I text this to 10 people or more?” If the answer is no, it has no place on twitter. If the answer is yes, please spare all of our sms inboxes and get on with it.
If all of this is STILL unclear, please direct all questions to The New York Times.
At this point I know you’re DYING to read it: my twitter
I hate to say it, but I’m still not sold. I hate SMS, so I’m not sure why I would want get opt into something that would result in me getting more of them. But then I am a Crotchety Old man with glasses