...I've been microblogging. Twittering, if you please. There's really no other explanation. It's as simple as that. Or not. I, a staunch advocate of writing lengthy letters over e-mails (refer to previous post for more on that), have been bitten by the 140-characters-only bug. And how!
I like the fact that so many of those random, ostensibly irrelevant thoughts I may have while driving mean something in Twitterworld. I don't have to wait for something to hit me - anger me, surprise me, please me - before I carefully craft out the best blogpost on it that I can. 30 seconds, 140 characters, one tweet - and I'm done. Convenient has a new meaning.
I like the fact that so many of those random, ostensibly irrelevant thoughts I may have while driving mean something in Twitterworld. I don't have to wait for something to hit me - anger me, surprise me, please me - before I carefully craft out the best blogpost on it that I can. 30 seconds, 140 characters, one tweet - and I'm done. Convenient has a new meaning.
Friends who are new to the network often end up exasperated - they don't get what the big deal is. Give it time, I say. I remember my first few tweets being reflective of someone who was completely lost and out-of-place on a website where everyone seemed to be RTing and @-ing like that was life's purpose. A couple of months later, not only has Twitter become the purpose of my - well - mornings, I am also officially, and happily, hooked to the damn thing.
There's so much you can do with it. Every tweet may not necessarily be an answer to the original what-are-you-doing but oftentimes, it turns out to be much more worthy an update than an answer to that question would have been, tweets on the Iranian elections being a case in point. Of course, there is always going to be that league of users whose updates will involve walking the dog or watching their hair grow. That's your cue to use the block function.
As fanatical as I sound right now, I don't think it's the answer to everything. For one, there's only so much you can do in 140 characters. You can try to fill them with all the wisdom in the world, borrowed or original, but unless you have a link that expounds on it, you're going to have a tough time making sense. Let's face it, you can't make an argument or a case for anything on Twitter. You make it somewhere else and link it to your Twitter account - that's do-able, and advisable, and a great example of how to use the network. But fortunately or unfortunately, that's most of what you're going to be able to do with that much space.
Verdict: There's really no competition. Depending on what you want to say, you either blog or tweet. It's really a judgement call more than anything else. Some things in life deserve full blog posts. For everything else, there's Twitter.
