Trialling Twitter

Out of sheer curiosity, I am trialling the must-have website of 2009; Twitter.

Out of sheer curiosity (and because I can see that it might have some value for me), I have joined the must-have website of 2009 – Twitter.

For now it’s a trial, to see what it is capable of and what it can deliver for me.

Despite the popularity of Twitter, I am not aware of any of my close friends or family posting to the website (yet). Then again, I don’t know anyone who uses RSS either, but I have seen that RSS has massive benefits in increasing website traffic and exposing my work to the right people. So perhaps Twitter might do the same?

Aside from Flickr, I have avoided social networking websites until now. I especially resisted the urge to join MySpace in 2007 and Facebook in 2008, even though everyone else had an account. For me, a website has to be useful and engaging. And since I couldn’t do much more on Facebook than I could do in real life (or via other means on the internet), I decided there was no real value in me joining up.

Twitter has been much-talked about in the Australian media this year, even on the ABC. Curiously, much of the chatter (or should I say twittering?) has been about how no-one really understands what the purpose of the website is (or how it must be used by twits – boom-tish!) And it is true that Twitter’s functionality is very limited because each post is constrained to 140 characters.

Despite this, I want to see whether I can use Twitter to draw a new audience to my blog, and my photography. I have already linked both websites to my Twitter account, which will be updated when these two sites are. But it also will allow me to post short messages that might otherwise be too trivial to bother writing a blog post about.

For instance, if I was travelling and wanted to let everyone know I’d arrived safely, I could easily do so without the need to write a long email or send an SMS. No-one in their right mind would bother posting such trivial information on their blog website. With Twitter, the information could be dispersed easily to my Twitter page from a mobile phone, without me even needing proper internet access. This could be very useful. It would also make it much cheaper than sending text messages to mobile phones.

What also attracts me to Twitter is that it is open.

I resent the fact that I am forced to actively participate  in Facebook et al. Even if I just want to see my friends photos, chat, et cetera, I am not only forced to open an account but start my own site. Twitter doesn’t require others to join to view the posts, and that is how the internet should be. After all, isn’t the sharing of knowledge and information the whole purpose of the internet? Whilst we all share some things privately over the internet (email, private photo albums etc), I see no point in a “lock out” system except to increase revenue to the social networking websites that operate such a system.

If you want to access my Twitter page, go to twitter.com/adamdimech.

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