Why twitter rocks

It is perfectly possible to be a great artist, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you get everything right. More generally though, for all its success, there are quite a lot of twitter sceptics out there, especially in the British political blogosphere (on this, see Sylvester vs. Dale). I am certainly in the enthusiast column. But I speak with the zealotry zoolatry (don’t you just love spell checkers!) of a convert. I have had a twitter account since May 2007, but started off using it very slowly. I didn’t really get the point. Looking back over my twitter home page, I only used it a couple of times a month for the first few months. But then I suddenly got it, in part because I started to use twitter in a different way – I changed my hardware (better phone and desktop client) and started to appreciate the social aspects of twitter, rather than seeing it as a broadcast medium.

I doubt I will be able to convince everyone, but here are my five reasons why twitter rocks:

1. Less is more. It sounds quite rubbish – express yourself in 140 characters. Why would anyone want to do that? You could have a blog or a social networking profile, and not impose that limit on yourself. But sometimes, limitations work act not as a barrier, but as a spur. Famously, Paul McCartney wrote the song Picasso’s Last Words only allowing himself to use two fingers on the fret board of his guitar. Only having a 140 characters makes you think about what you are writing. I would not want to have to express myself that way all the time, but to do so occasionally is a good thing.
2. It is genuinely social. People make the mistake of thinking that twitter is a broadcast medium. It might be if you are a celebrity or a politician. But I love the fact it makes me feel closer to other people than anything else online, including Facebook. I think this is because it is just so simple. Especially instrumental in this is the fact that it has its own internal messaging system (you can send either open or closed messages to anyone on twitter by including their name in the message). Because the messages are short, you can use this to have conversations with people, but in a way that it far less intrusive than chat software. Perhaps the ultimate expression of the social aspect of twitter is that hashtag, where you code messages with a # and a key phrase. For example, The Change We Need has a hashtag of #cwn. This means that people can find all the comments relating to a specific topic or, as we are, publish them on a website as a feed. I have actually attended conferences (I admit this may come with my line of work) where people are using twitter to discuss speakers as they give their presentations. This is an amazing resource.
3. It acts as a hub for all your online activity and is very good for multimedia. I use twitter as the hub for pretty much all my online publishing. I sync it with my blog and Facebook. I haven’t directly updated my FB status for months. I just fire my updates at twitter and it syncs up. Also, it is also a fantastic tool for linking to other web content, such as photographs, videos and pages with interesting info on it.
4. It is perfect for the mobile web. I really got into twitter when I got it working on my phone. It became really easy to ping status updates onto it. Of course, you can do this with other social networking sites, but twitter is simply a more elegant solution, because it is so uncluttered. It is a very pure platform in that sense.
5. It is a good first effort at collective intelligence. This is the exciting one for me. Twitter allows you to draw on information from millions of people and organisations. In part this is because it is so open. Facebook, for example, cannot be used in this way. As a result, on some occasions (at the moment very limited occasions, admittedly), twitter  is much faster than major news organisation, simply because its outputs are the product of such a disseminated network – this is the classic spider v. starfish scenario. For example, when Google search went down a few months ago, I was able to use twitter to check whether other people were having the same experience as me. Sure enough one quick use of twitter search offered hundreds of tweets of people asking what was going on with Google. I suppose this last one isn’t technically an argument for twittering, but just for twitter. You can, after all, use twitter search without contributing yourself. It is the classic free rider scenario. If you left aside points 1-4, then it might be argued that a utility maximising individual would consume collective intelligence without contributing to it. But – thankfully – we aren’t necessarily utility maximising individuals. After all, no one would donate blood… for baby kittens… or something.

So, for what it is worth, my advice to everyone is to get a good client on their desktop and then on their phone, and give twitter a go.