Andrew Dubber     

A long while back, I signed up with Twitter. It was new and I’m always curious to find out about new things.

If you haven’t encountered it, it’s a bit like the Facebook update thing: ‘What are you doing now?’. You type in a short message of up to 140 characters that lets people know what you’re doing, thinking about or involved in. The clever bit is that it’s nicely integrated with mobile phones, so you can text your updates while out and about, and you can also be texted with updates from people you are ‘following’.

My initial impression was that this was something my students would be all over in seconds. It had all the ingredients: SMS messaging, total interconnected socialising, and the potential for endless inane prattling. But they don’t seem interested.

I knew a few people who used it at the time, but I quickly became tired of it, because it’s only really useful when people who know each other are all using it fairly regularly.

It’s been referred to as micro-blogging – and it’s not generally useful at the level of individual posts, but over time, you get a picture of what the people you know are up to, and concerned with. This is Twitter’s greatest strength. When I next bump into someone I know who uses it, I can ask ‘Oh, how did it go with…’ or ‘I’m glad you enjoyed…’.

It gives a nice cumulative overview of what’s happening in the lives of people you care about or are interested in, without having to ring them, email them or text them every day or so to ask ‘So, now what are you doing?’.

And I think people are starting to find out. Like Facebook before it, which took ages for people to really hook into it, Twitter seems to be taking off. More and more people I know are starting to use it, and every day, it becomes more and more a part of my daily communication.

I like to think I do interesting things from time to time. If you want to join Twitter and ‘follow’ me, I’d be absolutely happy for you to do so. My Twitter username is simply dubber. You can see what I’m up to anytime by looking at my Twitter profile, or you can sign up and get updates via SMS, Instant Messenging software or on the web.

Until this week, I was convinced that it was just us geeks that liked to play with this kind of technology. But regular people are starting to find out it’s useful, and not pointless, difficult or scary in any way, which is quite nice.

Tagged: Internet