What is Twitter For?
As you may have deduced from the contents of this blog’s sidebar, I am an active Twitter user, and so are many of my friends. Among people I’ve met who don’t use Twitter, the most common question is: “What is it for?” A valid question indeed, as one must be wary of investing time in activities whose ultimate purpose is not known. I will explain, if only to give myself an easy out the next time someone asks me what is up with this Twitter thing.
Many people see Twitter’s tagline “What are you doing?” and equate it to publishing every boring, mundane detail of what goes on in one’s everyday life, ala the infamous “Twitter shitter“ example. While I suppose one could use Twitter in this way, they surely wouldn’t retain many followers. The point of the whole thing, at least in my mind, is to tell all your friends about things you might mention in a normal face-to-face conversation; the old “What have you been up to?” line. If something is so mundane that you wouldn’t bother mentioning it or showing it to anyone in person, you’re probably not going to tweet about it either.
Beyond that, Twitter also serves as a unique mode of communication, a way of carrying on a conversation with someone. It’s close to the immediacy of instant messaging, but is much less intrusive, and every message is a broadcast to everyone who’s interested in what you’re doing. This makes Twitter particularly well-suited to casual queries not directed at any one person, though it can of course be used for more direct communications with the handy “@username” idiom. Some might find it strange that status updates and conversations are mingled together in the same timeline, but I find Twitter’s ultra-simplistic approach appealing (and there’s always Direct Messaging for private exchanges).
One might point out that all of Twitter’s features appear to be a strict subset of the communication tools that Facebook provides, and if you said that today, you’d be right. A year or two ago, it was a different story, but Facebook is always reworking or revamping something. Since Twitter appeared on the scene, Facebook added some new features that brought them up to parity, such as displaying wall posts in your timeline as “targeted” status updates (mimicking the @username thing). Right now, I only perceive two major differences between the ways that Facebook and Twitter approach social networking:
- Facebook is much more private and self-contained than Twitter. Unless you choose to lock down your timeline, everything you post to Twitter is out there on the internet, where absolutely anybody can read it (and maybe respond to it). On Facebook, typically only your friends or the people in your social group can see your status updates, and privacy is a much more fine-grained affair than Twitter’s boolean switch. This follows directly from the fact that…
- Facebook is a vastly more complex application than Twitter. Facebook isn’t even an application; it’s a platform. Where Twitter goes the ultra-simplistic route, Facebook’s design is multi-faceted, all-encompassing, and extensible. It’s not just status updates, it’s wall posts, photos, videos, groups, organizations, comments, discussion boards, polls, and just about every form of social interaction you could possibly think of (and probably a few more that you couldn’t think of).
It’s that last one that rather turned me off Facebook, and made me willing to check out Twitter. Facebook is so huge and complex that you can spend hours each day just wading through all the different channels for socialization, and while some people may enjoy doing exactly that, I always get the sense that I’m wasting a lot of time for very little gain. Twitter is social networking on easy mode; it has exactly the functionality you need to see what your friends are up to, and no more. I can appreciate that kind of focus and simplicity.
As a side note, I’m definitely not a fan of Twitter’s 140-character message limit, mostly because I frequently want to say things that are a good bit longer than that. I’m not sure exactly what Facebook’s limit on status updates is, but it seems much more reasonable by comparison. Might Twitter allow longer messages in the future, in a way that doesn’t require click-throughs and API tomfoolery? I hope so.