Dan Phiffer

Twitter is good (at some things)

A friend of mine commented on a Twitter post (a “retweet”) that was automatically imported into this blog:

Twitter encourages less actual thought going into people’s posts. I know their tagline (and what my friends who love it say) is that “brevity enhances creativity” or somesuch, but what I’m looking for, and I think what most people are is not “creative” posts, but interesting ones, or thoughtful ones, or anything that I, as a reader, should spend more than 5 seconds reading and then promptly forget about. Twitter seems to me to exemplify the idea that internet should just be a series of witty one-liners, or embedded youtube links, etc. which I strongly disagree with.

James is making a case for good writing in service of fully-formed ideas. Yes, a thousand times yes! Post that on your blog and then link to it from Twitter. It’s a conversational tool, best used for time-sensitive, socially-relevant information. By using a link or a hashtag you can include a broader perspective within the 140-character limit. Even YouTube links.

There’s no correct way to use Twitter but, like all tools, its strengths are particular to its constraints. The community is tolerant and diverse and has collectively invented many of the service’s social conventions (e.g., @-messaging, retweets). Yes there are celebrities, marketing blowhards and thousands of people I’d never want to encounter online or in person. But there are also people I care very much about and those whose work I admire greatly.

Twitter is not the answer to all our problems, it may not live up to its hype. But it’s really good at some things. It’s worth a try.