Instant Communication
I finally signed up for Twitter, though I'm not entirely sure why. I'm following on Twitter all of the people I have in my feed reader; I have a few of them as IM contacts; and I see most of them in IRC #habari most of the day, too. The best analogy for Twitter that I can think of is "asynchronous public messaging". It can be used like instant messaging, where you chat back and forth with contacts, except that it's available for everyone to see and it doesn't happen in realtime.
Some folks use Twitter to post short updates about something that they want to share that might not merit a full blog post. Other folks use Twitter to ask the same question of a group of people. For example, ringmaster asks Philly folks about where to dine: rather than send the same IM or email to all of his contacts, he can put it on Twitter and the folks who follow his Twitter account can reply as they see fit: IM, email, Twitter response, etc. Ringmaster's use of twitter is one of the best that I've seen: he has several groups of online acquaintances and he communicates with them quickly and succinctly through Twitter. I'm not sure that I'll use it nearly as aggressively or effectively, but I'll give it a shot.
Looking around, I see that there are tons of similar ways to support ad-hoc communication for various purposes. In addition to Twitter, there's Tumblr. Some folks use Flickr for quick group chats. Then there are the bigger institutions like Facebook, MySpace, LiveJournal, etc.
I have a blog, a Flickr account, and now a Twitter account. I'm also on several IM networks. I'm left scratching my head at why I should pursue any of these other channels for connecting with my friends. I'm not interested in meeting new people, particularly, and I'm not a compulsive signer-upper for new online services. What do these new services offer me -- the user -- that is of substantial value over what I already have?
Perhaps I'm overly skeptical: I recognize that most of these online services are commercial ventures, and their driving motivator is to earn money. Some are more commercial than others; some aren't yet as commercial as they're likely to become. Are they truly offering me a new, valuable service, or are they merely offering me something in order to make money off of me, whether that's through paid upgrades, or my eyeballs on their partner's advertisements?
I use Twitter for random links, small tidbits and other non bloggie things. I tried out Pownce too, but Twitter seemed to be the better choice for some still undefined reason. I do jump on a lot of the new services though, but find that the only ones I really use are Facebook, Twitter and Last.fm. Last.fm actually provides some value, so does Twitter to a certain degree.
Facebook is pretty much useless, but a lot of my non techie friends use it.
I do tend to join sites at random, but it seems that my overall experience is very similar to Christian's. I like twitter, because I can update via SMS. The one site that's not quite a social network, but sort of is, that I use a lot is LibraryThing. It more of a social network for the books than the users, but I think that's what I like about it. The Facebook/Friendster/MySpace stuff is used for people who aren't quite as web savvy. It allows me to keep some level of contact with people I probably wouldn't socialize with at all otherwise, but am still interested in knowing how their lives are going.
I was doing this long before the advent of the internet in normal everyday life. In high-school I used to keep in touch with friends I've never seen via ham radio. If we wanted to chat we'd call each other on the phone, let it ring once and hang up. That was our signal to get on the radio at such and such a frequency right now.
I was probably the only one in my high-school who had friends that I had never seen, just talked too.
Bwah-hah-hah! I just made $$ by finally getting you to sign up for Twitter! If only...
Twitter has been pretty useful for me. There are certainly occasions when it's not as useful, or even aggravating. Like when everyone I know went to some conference that I would have loved to go to.
I've joined a bunch of the communities you've mentioned, mostly to try them and see if they had anything worth keeping up with. For one, Pownce was fairly useless to me. Tumblr is an interesting concept that my blog already fills much better. Facebook is use by just enough people I know to need to have an account there to keep up with them.
Given the impetus to whittle down my service usage to just one, I think I'd keep Twitter out of the whole lot. It has proven itself on more than one occasion.
Ha, and here I thought that "compulsive signer-upper" bit was directed at me. Last week alone I signed up for at least four supposedly-beta level communities, including two that exist solely to redistribute invitations to the others. Think Gmail swapping but on a massive (and massively stupid) level.
I've got Pownce, and no clue what to do with it. I've never heard of LibraryThing, but will probably have an account there by day's end.
Yet I don't have twitter. I don't see the point until a whole lot of people are already on it - this I can say because I can't even count the number of sites I've joined without a group of people with me, and then abandoned because I wasn't interested in making many new friends.
I can count on one hand the people I keep in touch with that I've never met in person. Another hand is the (again unmet) people I corresponded with that may recall the exchange. As such I don't have much use for another social network, or seven. Except the seven I'll have joined by November.
Will twitter be one of them? Who knows.
...ar it played within moments!
I haven't tried out the social aspects of last.fm yet (remember: I'm a late adopter of internet services, and not particularly keen on social network services), but I've been contempl...
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