Artem Russakovskii's programming and technology blog

Updated: May 22nd, 2009

Introduction

Let’s face it – the majority of the population doesn’t understand twitter. They don’t get its true value – all they see is an obnoxious social network full of exhibitionists tweeting about millions of mundane things of every minute of their lives.

Except, twitter is much, much more than that. In addition to all the wankers talking about themselves 24/7, of course. Twitter is what you make it to be. You can follow boring, uninteresting people with interests in growing cactuses (cacti?) and collecting fur balls. But you can also follow people sharing piles of interesting and useful information (see bullet points below). Just do me one favor and repeat after me: twitter is not only for publishing your detailed crapping schedule. Get over it, step over your prejudice, delay arriving to conclusions until after trying it yourself.

Don’t get me wrong – I was one of those people before and resisted joining twitter for many months, even years. I didn’t understand it either and didn’t want to voluntarily sign up for just another source of distraction. Here are my findings after joining twitter 2 months ago.

Real Reasons To Use Twitter

1. Most up-to-the-second updated search engine on things going on now

This is invaluable. Plane crash? Digg,com down? Searching twitter would yield instantaneous results because somebody somewhere is tweeting about it. And I’m not talking about biased and edited media – just real people.

Here is the perfect example of something that happened while I was writing this article. I was sleeping happily when some shaking woke me up. I couldn't figure out if I had just dreamt about an earthquake or one just actually happened. There was no more shaking, so I stumbled to my computer and did a quick twitter search for “earthquake”. Within seconds I knew it was indeed an earthquake, and within minutes what the magnitude was. Do you see value in this? I do.

2. Following important people in your field

Whatever your field is – web development, brain surgery, economics – anything, you will find colleagues whose ideas are interesting to you. You can also just follow plain geniuses, like Matt Cutts of Google or Om Malik of GigaOM. Believe me, a smart and interesting person makes sure to be interesting and smart on twitter as well, otherwise their audience drops off. Either way – you are in control. X and Y too boring for you? Stop following them and start following Z.

3. Keeping up with the latest news and updates

You can use twitter as pseudo-RSS by following, say, @cnnbrk (CNN Breaking News), new posts on FML @fxxxmylife, or jQuery updates at @jquery. As events occur, you get instant notifications in your twitter feed.

4. You can talk to companies directly, in a public, open way

For example, I’ve gotten personal replies from Comcast (@comcastcares) and Hulu (@hulu) within minutes of tweeting to them. Because the tweets are public rather than private the way emails would be, there is more pressure to respond to everyone and do it faster. Got a problem? Chances are twitter can help. I also noticed that everyone is inherently polite on twitter – there are no dumb flame wars.

5. In my experience, you will actually get a lot fewer “taking a dump” messages on twitter than on Facebook

… especially with Facebook’s new design. Let me tell you a little secret about your friends – they are not all geniuses and their comment rate seems to be inversely proportional to their brilliance. So before you say that twitter is useless, think about your Facebook account.

6. I’m not one to care much for following celebrities or famous people

… however I still think it’s fascinating that more and more celebrities and prominent people get on twitter, seemingly bridging the difference gap between themselves and regular folks. For example, Ashton Kutcher @aplusk constantly tweets and takes pictures with his phone (mostly of his wife Demi Moore, who is also an avid twitterer @mrskutcher). The fact that you can tweet @ Ashton and he’ll undoubtedly read your message and maybe even respond is kind of cool if you think about it. What kind of a fan club gives you such proximity to your favorite celebrity? What kind of fanclub is better than twitter for celebrities themselves?

Twitter is what you want it to be. Twitter is what you make of it.

140 Characters

Twitter’s 140 message limit, is it a curse or a blessing? My opinion is that it was an absolutely crucial element in site’s appeal and remarkable growth – an average person wants to skim through headlines and read in detail only what seems interesting. Too much information = information overload, even if it’s only a few more characters. I don’t think twitter would have picked up, had it not had this harsh character limit.

What do you think? Did you even have enough attention span to read the above 3 sentences?

Want To Make Twitter More Fun?

Check out my cleverly named Twitter.com Autocomplete, Auto URL Expansion, Auto URL Shortener, RT Button, Nested Replies, Inline Media Embed, Search Tabs, And More article.

Use Digsby, Tweetdeck, and other apps to take twitter with you to your desktop. See Top 10 Reasons Why Digsby ROCKS for more info on Digsby.

Check out this greasemonkey script that augments your google search results with Twitter ones:

Twitter Prediction?

Will my twitter predictions come true by the end of 2009? Read them here (hint: they already have, see below).