Twitter re-visited

A month or so ago I posted that I didn’t really understand what all the fuss was about Twitter. I poked my head in to the question a little bit and then decided to leave it alone.

But Twitter has not gone away. So I thought I’d have another look at it. I signed myself up for a twitter account (Jasonp107 if you’re curious), and I’ve been reading what Dave Winer wrote, and what’s up on Technology Review and TechCrunch.

It turns out you can do a lot of interesting things with twitter. At it’s base it’s an RSS feed that you can update easily from the ‘net, cell phone, or IM network, but the API also allows people to add some other functionality, like mapping out where people are when they’re posting to twitter (twittering?). Supposedly, twitter can and will be used as a more open-platform IM client, and I’m not sure I understand how that would really work yet, but if it happens, it could be cool.

In all that, though, I’m not sure I see the significant leap forward that some people do. It’s easy to talk to people on AIM, and if they don’t have AIM they probably have Skype, and if they have neither then I probably don’t need to talk to them on a daily basis and phone plus e-mail work just fine. Not to mention 140 characters is 20 shorter than a standard text message.

If Twitter’s future is really just a way of staying in touch, I’m still not terribly excited about it.

But more important than all the applications of twitter is the fact that it’s kind of fun. It’s fun to throw up one line about what you’re doing every now and then.

The problem is this one, however: it’s extra work, and to do it all the time takes some energy (not to mention some text messages). I know that for me, the work will far outweigh the fun. It won’t be long before my Twitter posts stop, just because I don’t feel like making them.