I find it amazing that, in the short space of two weeks—if you don’t count the two year hiatus following my first attempt at it—I have not only signed up for and begun using Twitter, but have become an absolute expert on it, able to philosophize and ruminate from a position beyond rebuke. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair! (All right, that’s not from Virgil, but listening to the Aeneid every morning on my way to work does make me want to write a lot more bombastically than I usually do. Which, I guess, would be turning it up starting at zero, because my writing is a lot of things, but bombastic it ain’t.)
Twitter is as creaky as an app can be that has become a cultural phenomenon. Part of its creakiness is a result of its phenomenonicality (a word Derrida wishes from his grave that he had invented if, indeed, he didn’t). That is, its fast growth is one of the reasons it fails regularly because, apparently, it isn’t exactly a marvel of scalability. (Compare Facebook, which is about 10 times as huge, which does scale well. Then again, Facebook does a lot more than Twitter, so for it to succeed at all it has be have been built out of sterner stuff.) Twitter is often just too busy for its own tubes, not to mention that its popularity has made it a target for various exploits. Still, despite its ups and downs, it has a variety of values, and these make the whole thing worth it. Whether or not we continue for any length of time in a Twitter universe, or move to some other comparable (and hopefully better) universe, remains to be seen. But the benefits of a system like this are pretty good, and worth maintaining.
First of all, Twitter is a cell phone connector. I find this potentially its most valuable function. Everybody has a cell phone nowadays. (In the very near future, everyone will upgrade to a Maguffin machine that combines telephone and most essential computer functions; that Maguffin plays into my thinking, obviously.) At the point where my team is entirely connected with cell notifications, we can move the little army much more efficiently than we do now, keeping families back home advised of those movements at the same time. This is extremely useful. It does, needless to say, require discretion. We only link the people we need to link, otherwise we will be engulfed in noise.
A second benefit, still phone-related, is as a public address system. Unlike the team communication, which is multidirectional, a public address functionality is the making of announcements from tab to the tournament. Given the remoteness of some tab rooms, especially at college tournaments, this is also very useful. Attendees at a given tournament could sign up for mobile notices for specific tournaments, turning off the notices when the event is over. Again, this will minimize noise, but when it’s on, it will provide a valuable service. (A point I’m trying to make with CP is that using phones on the back end is just as valuable as using them for receiving messages; phone service is much more ubiquitous than internet service in our present universe, especially at non-college venues. This will change, but the situation at the moment is what it is.)
Other benefits of Twitter are not necessarily telephonic, and of a more season-to-taste nature. Tomorrow I’ll Twitter reports from the Spring Fun RR in Harrison just as a test. Imagine if twenty of us were Twittering, say, CatNats. People not there could follow the tournament, or people there could provide a running commentary. It could be fun (can you imagine the conversation during the inevitably endless thankathon preceding the awards?). There are ways of following a mob, most notably through #hashtags. Searching for #CatNats will bring up messages on the tournament from every user, followed or not (although I think you do have to follow @hashtags to make this happen).
Another aspect of Twitter is following people who are worth following. You must decide who these people are yourself. I wouldn’t want to follow any of these on my phone, but I have a handful of tech celebs who provide me with insight on new apps and the like, and I find that very useful. I can follow friends, but so far most people who use Twitter are simply setting it up to echo Facebook (or vice versa). I love ya, pal, but I don’t have to see everything twice, and if that’s what you do, I’ll stop following you on one or the other. Then there are just general people who have mastered the art of the small-space blog post, the interesting narrative in 140 characters. (No doubt Japanese schoolgirls—the ultimate test of technology—are writing whole novels on Twitter!) Of course, there are also celebs who are simply taking up bandwidth. The more famous someone is, as a general rule, the less likely they're worth following. I mean, how many celebs do you actively follow on Facebook? That's what I thought. The same paradigm applies with Twitter.
Twitter is, at the moment, driven by phones, and as I suggested, albeit parenthetically, phones are going to be evolving at a fast clip over the next few years. I am amazed at what I can do with my Touch, for instance, when I have wireless access, and that machine is merely an iPhone without a phone.
Anyhow, I will be continuing to experiment and explore. Feel free to join up and do likewise. I’ll follow you if you keep it unique. I promise to do likewise (although I will admit that at the moment, @tabroom and Tab Room on Facebook are replicating, but I’ll probably end this shortly, since I can’t for the life of me remember why it ever made sense—something to do with being unable to plug in cells to Twitter, I think, which is better solved by users figuring out how to plug in cells to Twitter).
Onward and upward!
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