One positive aspect of getting an Android smart phone, i.e. of being online anywhere/anytime, is that I can read Neil Gaiman’s ever entertaining Twitter feed while sleep-walking home from a night out. A corollary of this is that I can then tweet to my own Twitter feed, too. Which I do.
It’s an interesting technosocial experiment on an interesting medium, which is most of the time used for useless purposes (“I sneezed twice this morning” kind of posts), but not exclusively. Interesting to see information propagate. Interesting to be encouraged to write micro-reviews of things I’d otherwise be too lazy to write a whole blog post about. Interesting to bathe in ambient superfluous noise. Interesting to hear people constantly mistake “entertainment” for “information”. Interesting to be one click away from your favourite celebrities. Interesting to read what people are interested in, what they think is relevant, and disagree with them. Interesting to observe people communicate, because that’s what we all do, and that’s just a new way to do it.
Twitter has a huge number of shortcomings, the most evident of which is its extremely poor support for semantics (“it’s all just text” is a lame workaround to avoid having to solve a deeper problem); in that technical regard, I find Tumblr incomparably more attractive and interesting. I might even give it a go in parallel, to explore all what it offers, while hoping that Twitter catches up with richer features.
But I’ll keep reading and posting to Twitter, too, because it’s where the critical mass has been attained to make it one of the most interesting online social artifact at the moment.
So if you’re so bored that you need to read more nonsense from me, subscribe to my Twitter feed (best done if you subscribe to the service yourself)!