I've been milling about for a month or more now in this virtual hotel called Twitter. There are a lot of parties going on. People come in and out of your room. You go in and out of some rooms. You can't help but notice that some tweeters are performing for their audience, being funny, interesting or profound. Others are standing in the shadows observing quietly. There are celebrities who follow no one. Just a broadcast medium for them. Just self-referencing themselves and their work while other celebrities trying their best to connect to their fans. Fans love getting the feeling of a personal connection, even if it is tweeting a message that will get no reply. And if there is a reply, the pronoun "I" or "me" is almost always attached. We commoners also start behaving like celebrities as we gather followers. We want more and more followers to quench our narcissitic desire. Aaah, to be followed must mean "you love me, you really really love me" as Sally Field declared when she won an Oscar. Ultimately we end up talking about ourselves in every other tweet.
Most of the people on Twitter seem to be from the social media and information technology business. Talking to each other or posting about their industry. There is no opportunity to create a community of like-minded tweeters because there are no directories. With blindfolds on we are shouting out in a crowd like street hawkers hoping to be heard. To make a some sort of transaction or connection. Accomplish something. But what?
Twitter. The grand experiment. We? - the frenzied mice spinning on our wheels and navigating the maze for some yet to be determined reward.
What has this global bulletin board accomplished? How is Twitter effective? Fine, okay Dell sold a lot of computers via twitter. But look who they sold it to? The industry people. Where is twitter effective? No, please, I don't want to know the hypothetical list of possibilities of what Twitter CAN do I want to know what it HAS done. Where is the measured impact? Give me results. I understand numbers.
I don't feel happy about Twitter yet. Jumped into this marriage but since I've given it a lot of time and energy, I'll stick it out. Few more months, then I'll re-evaluate. These days marriages are like that.
