I tried Twitter a little bit. I still don’t get it. It reminds me a bit of when I tried MySpace and eventually realized it just was not worth my time.
Twitter only really seems to have four functions and none of them seems worthwhile to me.
- Tell random snippets about what is going on in your life. - I have email. I have a blog or five. I have a phone. There are plenty of ways for me to tell people about what is going on in my life.
- Promote your blog. I read this post over at Mashable poking fun at Twitter being the evolution of the cat blog. That’s pretty funny and probably true for a lot of people. Then there was an update with a link to the Mashable Twitter account. I clicked over to read about how the Mashable cat was doing. Instead I found a whole bunch of links. Most of them are TinyURL links. I clicked a handful and they all redirected back to the Mashable blog. If I want to read Mashable, I’ll just subscribe to the blog, thanks.
- Link repository - Some people use it as a place to dump links to things they find interesting. This is probably the most compelling reason to follow somebody Twittering. Some people find some pretty interesting stuff on the internet.
- Mix of all of the above - I did find some people that were Twitting about their personal life, providing links to their own posts, and providing links to other stuff.
In the end, I decided it was not for me. I wonder what the next Web 2.0 craze will be.
I think your observations are right on target. I’m still experimenting with Twitter, though, and I think that if you use a Tweeting tool (I use Twitterific) and only follow certain people’s tweets, you can get more out of it. (I wrote an article about this on my blog.)
I’ve been active in Twitter for about two weeks now and find it’s a constant adjustment of my “friends.” Just this morning I “left” a “friend” who tweeted a self-promotional thing every few minutes. Sheesh! I admit that I have Twittefeed set up to tweet my blog posts (1 to 5 per day), but I also use it for personal updates. The people I follow use it for a mix of both things.
I haven’t dropped out yet — I’m still experimenting. I HAVE learned a few things from following the 20 or so Twitter members I currently follow. Whether I’ve learned enough to continue participation is yet to be seen.
If you decide to give Twitter another try, look me up. (I’m mlanger there.) I think I might want to add you to my list of Twitter “friends.”