For as long as I've used twitter, there's been something niggling me about it that I couldn't quite figure out, like most things of this nature, the problem was right there in front of my face.
Now, before I get into this, I need to note for the record that I love twitter. Of all the "social networks" that I've been exposed to, it's twitter that I'm hopelessly tuned to. I've had (and still do have a couple of these) facebook, bebo, plurk pownce, lastFM, coldfusioncommunity(of course) accounts but the difference is that whenever I boot up a computer, and I mean *every time* I get myself an interface to twitter, whether it's twhirl or the website itself, if I'm online, it's a given that I'm also on twitter and as such, I've made one or two observations about the service over the past 770(to date) "tweets".
I'm going to bypass the downtime completely, we're all aware of the problems, instead, I'm proceeding to a much more overlooked flaw. Now this "flaw" as I've called it wasn't always so, it's become one over time and by the evolution of how people use twitter, it's by no means anyones fault or anyones shortcoming, it probably couldn't have been seen coming, but I reckon (IMHO) that it's probably now worth addressing...hence this post. It's there on the interface every time you log into twitter, wrapped up in a simple h3 tag and it reads "What are you doing?" It is the absolute bedrock of what twitter was born on and grew up on but I argue that today, although it is still relevent, it's perhaps not telling the whole story.
Like many other twitter users, the service has become much much more than a simple question of what are you doing?, it's become a service for communication way more than that. I use twitter as a news feed, point of communication with clients, friends and mentors, means of finding out stuff and also, like a ton of other people, means to voice an opinion on one thing or another...therefore I move for the question to be changed to something like "What's on your mind?" or "What do you want them to know?" or something like that. I'm sure the massive twitter community will have other ideas about this and I'm interested to know what these would be so feel free to comment here.
right, thats tweet number 770, what can i do for 771....my twitter addiction is complete!
1 comments - Posted by mark at 12:46 AM - Categories: Ranting
