#18; A Simple World Within 140 Characters

The year of 2009 has seen Twitter become very much a mainstream tool of social networking, so to speak. No, it does not take all your personal details and flash them about for the world to see. No, it does not work on creating a webpage advertising yourself with a song streaming in the background and an offensive use of HTML. It’s simple; it allows you to express what you want to express in 140 characters. Simple; that to me is what makes Twitter so brilliantly useful. Those characters, that small message, can do so much. It can express a thought, pass on a message, anything that your mind can manage to withhold within such a small boundary. So what makes Twitter so useful? How can such a simple system provide such a useful result of success?

Much like the way it’s designed, the answer is simple – because it IS simple! It doesn’t need any kind of fancy web design to ‘pimp your page’ or show off photos left right and centre all over the place, it works because it’s simple. for myself I use it in a personal sense, I use it to express my feelings on various things, to simply place me feelings in a simple message for people who may actually want to hear it, to talk to the people I love and to hear from even the most ridiculous of sources such as the Fake F1 drivers that make up the entire grid basically, and if you’re an f1 fan, it’s definitely worth checking out. It’s not just f1 though of course, you know how much I love the sport so I apologise for going on once again! It’s very easy to find out information from people whether they be in the public eye in music, or films, or whatever (look at how much used Stephen Fry’s tweets have been mentioned in the media for example!) There really is a surprising amount you can do with this system and for people reading this who have never used the system, then I hope you can learn a bit or two as to how useful it has been so far.

Twitter though has proved that, since its’ insurgence as a mainstream use of micro-blogging (or social networking depending on how you view it) now it seems, that it can be fantastically useful though. I provide the example in which really shot up it’s status within the world of the interwebs earlier this year; the crash of the plane into the Hudson river in New York at the start of 2009. It wasn’t the journalistic predators of the world’s media that reached their way to the crash site first, but rather, simply a twitter user who uploaded a picture he took on his mobile phone, and posted the message to the public via the image sharing service TwitPic. From this, news began to spread and this ridiculous sounding message “There’s a plane in the Hudson” grew eventually into the realisation that a major event had actually happened, and the picture backed it up. Brilliant! It is things like this that make me love using the service though; when people start embracing it, major media centres, television presenters, companies, famous people, whatever, you can find out some brilliant little things that otherwise we wouldn’t know about whether they be for formality reasons (brief news posted on twitter may just be ignored as a simple comment elsewhere for example) or whatever, twitter has just provided a new way for people to just say things in a lovely, simple way.

It would be safe to say we’re living in a technology-based world now though. Teenagers and young adults are extremely tech-based in the way their lives are run, whether this be in an occupational purpose or for general casual reasons, as a society we log onto your computer and share images over the internet, blog much as I’m doing now, play games over huge distances with no real notice of how far you actually are and all of this is thanks to the advancement of technology over the past few decades. Again, I take another example into the tech-central society in even places you may not think of. The current disruption of power and society almost revolting in disgust at the elections in Iran has seen censorship of the country’s internet based social networking sources. The young within the country are still finding new ways to share information, to show video footage from their phones, to tweet messages in protest, disgust, anger and all this in ways that the government and censorship officers are simply unable to hold back. Using the twitter search, I decided to check out just how many people are talking about it in such a short period and within 5 minutes of waiting…

5 minutes of waiting, and 736 results from people talking about such a massive current event. I left the webpage open, and within 10 minutes, there were well over 1500 comments found, yet this is only from people mentioning it with the hashtag I searched for; for all I know in that 5 minutes there could have been hundreds more not using the hashtag to help, inform, retweet, whatever… just astounds me really. I apologise that I’m not the most convincing person to read in explaining why this amazes me, but knowing that thousands of people are discussing ideas all day and all night about something as serious as this makes me a bit happier about us as human beings. Stephen Fry posted the following comment in a twitter message last night: “Iranian govt should at least know we're watching & we care. We're not imperialists, we just care.” – there are simply no intentions to turn this into a political blog entry at the current events but this, for me, sums up just how much power we can have via these simple messages. It’s not even just about the Iran revolts, but everything in life, anything that upsets you, anything that delights you. Anything you want to talk about, there’s your stage.

As with everything else in life, Twitter comes with it’s criticisms from people. A lot of people have mentioned to me, “who cares if so and so is eating some pudding? Why do we need to know every 5 minutes?” – it’s a fair point. It’s bound to annoy people where you see updates like that for no apparent reason, but there’s so much out there that can be actually interesting to follow if you gave it a chance. Another complaint I’ve heard is that it is just ‘too simple’, to go back to what I discussed at the beginning of this entry. It is simple, definitely, but that’s what makes it work for me like I’ve already explained. Perhaps after the use of social networking websites such as Myspace, Bebo or Facebook you, as a user, are to expect some kind of similar service where you express your inner personality via a webpage or two? again, this for me is where Twitter shines; if you’re creative enough, there’s a grand amount you can express in those 140 characters.

I personally hope that the service doesn’t die down anytime soon. Obviously it’s been immensely popular recently and has become the darling for media in terms of popping it into the odd article and news report perhaps to appeal to a younger audience (although in experience, the user-base come from all ages of people to be fair!). If you are with us lovely folk on twitter, then please do follow me because I do vastly enjoy every single person’s comments that I follow as well as always welcoming people to try and enjoy the possibly annoying musings I tend to shout out  – you can find me @LukehMuse, and as you can see the last few updates get posted just over there on the right! Whala! This entry is very central to how I see the service obviously due to it being a personal blog, but I do want to know and for you as a reader (whether you use Twitter or not), what do you think about Twitter? Of course I would love to hear from your comments because, as I say, it still finds complaints in it’s sea of positive reception. A quick summary of what I think? It’s not just image sharing, or music streaming, or pages of information, it’s just one simple message… and the best thing about it is, it’ll never, ever need to be anything more.

Simple!