Unjournalism

The past week has brought two great posts on the power of Twitter. At the same time, my love and respect for Twitter and the people within my Twitter universe is growing like never before.

My Twitter consumption habits are continually evolving, and I think I’ve finally hit on something that works pretty well. First step: I follow anyone who seems even remotely interesting or who follows me first. If he or she is entirely uninteresting or completely annoying, I can always “unfollow.”

Until recently, I received all incoming tweets (not direct messages, but everything from anyone I follow) as Google Talk instant messages. There’s no way I’d opt to have every tweet sent to my cell phone as a text message, and instant message style was way more convenient than only interacting with twitter.com.

And I read every single tweet. Seriously. It wasn’t a Scoble-esque following of 6,000 people, but with 60 or so followees (at the time), it was a damn lot to read. People “in my crowd,” like Robert Scoble, BL Ochman, Todd Defren and Jeremiah Owyang, tend to tweet a ton. (Hooray for alliteration!)

Within the past couple of weeks, I’ve shifted course. I now use the desktop app Snitter for reading, writing and interacting with the Twitter world. I’ve also resolved to continue to grow my Twitter crowd, but not for popularity reasons. The way I use Twitter, the more smart, active people, the better. With that resolution, I’ve given up on my commitment to read it all. I now am smart enough to just keep the window open and watch the brilliance, humor, wit, observations, inanity and riff-raff fly by all day long. It’s a wonderful thing.

Part of the power of Twitter is that, among all of these social tools we use to communicate on the Web, this is the one that truly feels social. For me, blogs, podcasts and wikis are only “social” in comparison to, say, newspapers and network television. But with Twitter, I truly feel as though I’ve established some sense of a relationship with certain people.

One of the more insightful folks in my Twitter crowd is Garrick Van Buren, and he hits the nail on the head:

It’s my water cooler. It’s light, small, flexible, and I don’t mind the instability.

(By the way, he’s funny, too.)

What’s the point? I’ve spent a lot of time recently hashing out with colleagues the ins and outs of Twitter, why a person would use this vs. that, what it can and can’t do (technically and professionally), and the like. For me, it always boils down to this: Twitter, like many other things in life, online or off, is what you make of it.

The beauty is that I don’t have to work hard to make a lot of it. I rarely find the time to write meaningful blog posts, and when I finally think I’m going to, I never dig in because the writing I would like to accomplish is daunting. But Twitter’s 140-character limit is the polar opposite; it’s downright inviting. I’m sure my Twitter stream is far more valuable on a regular basis than this blog.

So there’s my brain dump on Twitter. I don’t think it’s what I had in mind when I started writing, but part of my goal was to think through my own usage and habits and see them in a new light. How about you: What are your Twitter habits, and how do they fit into your day?

Tags: Twitter, new media //