Note: My 2012 self wrote this. It is preserved for historical interest and amusement.
Hahahahahahahahahahahahaha look at all the services
ahem
So, if you’ve been hiding under a rock for the last decade, Twitter is a platform for microblogging, i.e. blogging with very short posts, called tweets, which have to be under 140 characters after they shorten all the links for you for no reason, often after you’ve already shortened it once somehow-or-other. And yes, I hopped onto the bandwagon during procrastination. Everybody who matters on the technological edges of the internet seems to have one.
I’m not arrogant enough to imagine I could compare Twitter to anything else authoritatively… I only barely count myself as using it. But a brief set of first impressions should be okay. Twitter is very public: you can see everybody’s tweets, who everybody is following, and who everybody is being followed by; the single privacy setting is a simple binary choice to lock up your account, so that everybody who wants to see what you posted needs your explicit authorization.
My Facebook feed consists of entries such as:
- photographs of people I barely recognize, which I scroll past quickly… unless my mom comes up and says “Who is that?” and spends ten minutes looking at more such photos while asking me questions like “How do you go to the next picture?” or “Why is this photo so blurry?”
- context-less fragments of some larger conversation, e.g. “LOL!” or “linglinglinggg” (copied verbatim from a status)
- alerts of J. Random Person having taken a Personality Test or scored too many lines in Tetris
- Meta-Facebook infographics, like a cloud of your closest friends or number of status posts. I tend to… have an extraordinarily negative impression of the type of narcissistic achievement-reliant… people… who need rewards at every step, except that they seem to be everybody… *sigh
Compared to that, the content I see on Twitter feels a lot more sophisticated. People make cool drawings, bring up inspiring quotes, crack deliciously nerdy jokes, write songs for their favorite search engine (!!!)… it’s all solid content, not something I can emulate yet. Unlike on Facebook, where I can get three likes with a status like “why are you liking my posts in 33 seconds”, despite being a very conservative friend-adder and commenter. (Or maybe that’s the reason: apparently if I control supply for posts tightly I can increase the demand. Although that shouldn’t be such a huge factor.) Okay, knowing that people out there who are listening exist at all is nice, but some posts are better than others… I wish people were more selective about “liking” things.
Anyway, all that rambling was to explain why I now also have a not-very-active box of tweets on the left sidebar that is slowly filling up with bloat, and why I have just gotten even better at procrastination than ever. I doubt that it would help my traffic to link up the Publicize function on this blog, though.