“Can I tweet about her blog?”* (pt. 1)
While I wait for Vista to load (I’ve been having serious technical issues with my old workhorse iBook G4), here’s a little story. In our assignment for Dean’s class for this week, we’ve been instructed to dip into a variety of social media tools and report. I’ve already been using Google reader, flickr, Twitter, and del.icio.us for a while, so my plan had been to try other products (e.g. Bloglines). However, this evening, my darling roommate asked me, unbidden, to explain how Twitter works so I thought I’d post the highlights of our conversation here.
Basically, I explained that Twitter is a form of microblogging: you write statements of 140 characters or fewer, which are posted to a sort of list. You can follow other people’s tweets, which means that you will see their posts interspersed chronologically with your own — and other folks can follow your tweets, too. (You can also restrict this.)
She said that was more or less what she thought, she just wasn’t quite sure how you do it, or what it looks like. We talked a bit about trending topics, the range of users, and some of the ways that Twitter has been used, such as during the protests in Iran. In a much smaller scale, I learned about Michael Jackson’s death on Twitter, a good hour before it was reported by the New York Times.
I’ve been using Twitter since about December of last year, and I have to say I remain amazed at how much people hate on it. Repeatedly, I’ve been asked, exasperatedly, what “the point” is. This points to a disappointing truth about affordance: some people will just not want to see the possibilities of any given tool. As librarians and archivists, we certainly have colleagues who have been resistant to various new technologies, from descriptive standards to OPACs. I’m not saying that we need to accept everything that comes our way, but open-mindedness tends to make things more interesting. However, on a personal level, if Twitter doesn’t work for you, don’t use it. It really is as easy of that.
*I overheard someone say this in the library where I worked this summer. The answer is: heck yeah, girl!
