I've spent the last 12 hours doing only 3 things; studying differential equations, sleeping and bugging all my friends to use Twitter. I think Twitter is so cool that it inspired me to start a blog. I've been inspired before but this is the first time that I'm actually following through with it. Why? Because it's the missing link in all these social networking infrastructures enabled by the Internet. You have your Social Sites (Facebook, MySpace), you have your blogs (do you need an example if your reading this?) you have photo sharing (Photobucket, Picasa) and so on and so forth. And lets be honest, the social sites do a pretty go job of rolling all these into one package... except for one thing: texting.
Now I don't mean instant messaging because Facebook has an awesome in-browser app that does just that. I mean SMS text messages from cell phones. In my little world this is the primary form of communication by a big margin. It is also the most efficient form of communication by that same margin. Where are you? What are you doing? Do you want to meet? Call me! These are all one-liners that initiate communication and can usually be answered back with one-liners. Are these terribly exciting or interesting? Not at all, but they are our most common forms of interaction.
Twitter made the connection. They have effectively connected our cell phones to our social sites and back to our cell phones. I am grateful. I can now update my status on twitter (and Facebook) by sending a text message from my phone. I can post a picture with a caption by sending an email from my phone. Twitter texts me when my close friends post anything on Twitter. So even if I'm stuck in a crowded bar I can let my friends know what's up with me and I will know what's up with them (but only if I want too!) You can easily enable and disable texts to your phone by sending a text to Twitter (or with a button on your Twitter home page.)
How is this better then just plain old text messages? Twitter was not designed for one-to-one communication. Text messages were. If I want to go to lunch with my friends I need to send them all text messages and then deal with coordinating and responding to the individual replies. With twitter I can just send it the text "Lunch at 12?" and any of my friends that have device updates enabled for my posts will get the message on their device and then they can just twitter back. Maybe we'll even get a few more people then we otherwise would have. THAT is social networking!
I'm finding I could keep ranting about this on a couple more points but I'll stop. In conclusion, Twitter is cool. To my friends: Please get an account.
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