Tweet Tweet

his past month I have heard the word Twitter more times than my previous twenty-one years and six and a half months of existence [editor's note: I am actually 22 and a half, not 21. I don't know what to tell you]. I have never tweet (tweeted?), nor do I really understand the appeal. I’m not really sure if this is just a further foray into narcissism, or if this is another manifestation of decentralised mass communication that has evolved from the Internet. I do use facebook, but I’m not really sure if there’s a large difference between a facebook status update and a tweet. Perhaps someone could enlighten me. I was relatively late jumping on the facebook train, not really for any ideological reasons, but I just didn’t really see the appeal there either, although I now find it quite useful for keeping in touch and coordinating events. I do also appreciate the irony in an online blogger accusing Twitter of narcissism, especially without having ever used the service, however I like to think that my posts represent more than mundane self-absorption (and in more than 140 characters).

An article on cbc.ca today said that as of February of this year, Twitter had more than seven million unique visitors, although sixty percent of people using the site were not coming back within the next month. That is compared to a seventy percent return rate for facebook at the same stage in its growth. Numbers like that suggest that Twitter will become a passing fad, without enough substance or evolution to maintain a large base of people. I suppose there will always be some Twitterers (twits?) who will maintain the service, but perhaps its popularity will fade into the netherworld of Internet memes (remember ICQ?).

From a cultural standpoint, it is interesting to question what Twitter says about us. My sister, who is recently back on the facebook train, had explained to me that she long-ago deleted her first account, because she found it to be nothing more than an inane waste of time, with little real value. I guess that comes down to how you use it. I have noticed a trend with the most recent incarnation of facebook down that road, with more status-updates and fewer wall-posts, becoming more about ME! I do enjoy following my friends’ various travels and projects, however it is of less interest to me that ‘Sarah is boooooooored.’ (More irony: I will likely inform people of this blog via facebook-status-update. Maybe I should tweet about it too.)

It will be interesting to see where facebook goes, and how it is used by us in the future and by future generations. Will it continue to devolve into a mess of personal updates and applications, or will it maintain its usefulness as a networking site. I suppose that is really up to the people who use it, but that begs the further question about the politics of technology and what the driving force behind the changes really is. Are people adapting to the technology as it is presented to them? Or is the technology shifting to shape the demands of the people. The new facebook layout was met with large amounts of backlash, and yet people have gotten over that and begun to shift the direction of the site again. Perhaps it is suiting to end this post with a mention of youtube, but for a remarkably funny song about the perils of MySpace and the potential for your children to find your profile in twenty years, check out MyHope.

Russ