Why People Don’t Get Twitter

I look at anti-Twitter articles like this one and I realize what it is people aren’t understanding about Twitter. People who hate it break out the “who cares what you are doing” argument. I’m not going to argue with that, but what I can tell you is that it’s not really about that.

When it first started, sure, I was just posting silly updates. But something happened: someone posted an update that was a direct response to my update. And I posted an update to someone else’s. Suddenly, it wasn’t just a medium to post inane updates. It became a mechanism for inane chatter. I suppose there’s not much difference in that distinction, but trust me, there is.

Twitter has become, as I wrote before, my backchannel for life. I have connected up with a slowly-but-surely growing list of people that share a common interest, as well as some people that just like me. It’s IRC without the chatrooms and certainly without being tied to a computer. But it’s also a way to reach certain people who carry lots of mobile phones, thus never sure what I should use to reach them on. Twitter virtualizes all that for me.

Whether you find any value in that or not, well let’s just say I don’t care if you do or not. I do and so do a lot of other people. What really matters, of course, is how Twitter will monetize themselves in the end.