[Sigia-l] Twitting yet?

[Christopher Fahey]

You really cannot judge the effectiveness of Twitter until:

1) You sign up for it.
2) You have a group of 20+ friends (people who you actually give a shit
about) also signed up for it, all of them added to your friends list.

Unless you have these two things, you really have no idea what Twitter
is good for. You probably also should get Twitterific or Twitteroo, too.


Honestly I do resent products that require you to fully adopt them into
your lifestyle to even have the foggiest idea what it is for. But when
it first emerged, IM was one of those products, and now Twitter is too.
But there are some things that genuinely fall into this category. 

You can't truly know it until you see it running for real, and the only
way to see it for real is to do #1 and #2 above. Signing up by yourself
isn't good enough, and watching the public timeline to judge Twitter
doesn't give you that personal sense that your actual friends do. 

It may emerge that Twitter's core concept -- what Leisa Reichelt calls
"Ambient Intimacy" (http://www.disambiguity.com/ambient-intimacy/) -- is
something that can be built into other apps (like a social network, IM,
or a PIM) more readily someday, but for now it's a fascinating and 100%
brand-new new emerging paradigm of technologically-mediated social
interaction. It may not have the same impact as email or the telephone,
but it's about as different from what came before as those technologies
were from their predecessors. And, as with those technologies, the
protocols and etiquette for Twittering still hasn't emerged yet.

You have a choice: you can fully and earnestly adopt it now, or you can
wait until it either dies away, is appropriated into other systems, or
is ubiquitous and you're the last one to the party. Like Yoda says,
"There is no Try".

-Cf

Christopher Fahey
____________________________
Behavior
http://www.behaviordesign.com
me: http://www.graphpaper.com 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: sigia-l-bounces at asis.org 
> [mailto:sigia-l-bounces at asis.org] On Behalf Of Jamie Foggon
> Sent: Tuesday, March 20, 2007 3:43 PM
> To: sigia-l at asis.org
> Subject: Re: [Sigia-l] Twitting yet?
> 
> This is just my personal opinion, but I think Twitter is a 
> case of pushing what can be done to the limit. It's not 
> necessarily useful, or has any longevity.
> 
> The way the internet has evolved over the last few years 
> reminds me weirdly of a hyper-accelerated version of the 
> evolution of art from traditional to impressionist, to 
> modernism... eventually getting to Malevich's 'White on 
> white'. People always want to push to the limits of what can 
> be done, and the web is going through this intense social 
> networking phase - where Twitter must be pretty much the 
> logical extreme.
> 
> The level of detail cannot get more granular than telling all 
> your friends you've just eaten a sandwich or farted. What 
> added value does this provide to anyone else? Wouldn't it be 
> better to spend the time doing more worthwhile things, than 
> spending valuable seconds of your life telling people about 
> the mundane?
> 
> I hope that the social networking revolution will eventually 
> mature into helping connect worthwhile thoughts and actions 
> and make those connections more pertinent and life enhancing. 
> Information overload will get even more of an issue as we get 
> towards Minority Report as a reality - who needs EVEN MORE 
> distractions from actually trying to achieve something with the day!!
> 
> Am I missing something fundamental with this? I think its a 
> banal waste of time. Do stuff, don't talk about it, and at 
> least dont talk about stuff that is not interesting!
> 
> --
> Jamie Foggon
> ------------
> IA Summit 2007:  Enriching IA
> Rich Information, Rich Interaction, Rich Relationships March 
> 22-26, 2007, Las Vegas, NV www.iasummit.org
> -----
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