It's happened

My consumption into the social networking collective is complete with my acquisition of a Twitter account. If you don't want to read through my feelings on the subject, you can just jump to finding me there, as the_real_tyler.

Let me state briefly my beliefs about Twitter: I think that microblogging, at root, is a fantastic concept, and one with a lot of great applications. I also think that most people do not apply it well at all.

Microblogging's two root words suggest Twitter's real function--it's a blog for things too short or too immediate to write a full blog post about. I think that news stations have also made good use of it by having Twitter feeds for their various commentators, as per what Rick Sanchez does with his Twitter account, to create a running dialog about the news items of the day. Unfortunately, most people seem to feel that they should use it to tell everybody about everything they are doing, like a progress bar for the minutiae of their lives. The stereotype of Twitter I have seen has been, more or less, is a 15-minute span of updates consisting of four message, one of which is an in-joke aimed at a user we may not follow and three of which are about their pants.

I am opposed to this use of Twitter. Not because I think it's unacceptable generally--I won't go against my general feelings about free speech--but because I think that it colors everyone's perceptions about Twitter in a way that it shouldn't be. I think Twitter could be a lot more interesting than it is, and I want to do my part to make it so. Plus it feeds into my secret need to be on every social networking site in the world.

Except MySpace. Screw MySpace.