Thanks to Mike Jones, my twitter life sprung out of nowhere just over a year ago. Reflecting on 2010 got me thinking about what impact it had on my life. Twitter is a mixed bag – just like facebook is. There’s a blurring about who you are, what your interests are and what you focus on.
Most of my connections on twitter tend to be focused on my profession – those people in the development, lean, agile and systems thinking space. Less of who I follow tend to be about things going on around London. There’s this slight blurring between professional and personal lives. I don’t think this is necesarily a bad thing. Where facebook, at least how I previously used it, was more focused on the social connections, Twitter provides connections to people across the Internet I wouldn’t normally make so many connections to.
The beauty of how it works is the simplicity and openness. While facebook is infamously open with your personal data, to the degree that they’ve now changed some of that, twitter is simply open with ideas. You don’t necesarily need to “accept invites” to send messages, don’t need to join groups to participate in conversations. Where the Interent and Google provide long term storage for ideas and the enabling infrastructure, twitter is definitely more the “hive mind” of humanity as it evolves. Memes, or ideas, cascade across through retweets. More relevant, though sometimes at a cost of polish and filtering, news arrives faster than through typical avenues. Observing this phenomenon intrigues me. For that, I’m indebted to Mike Jones to setting me up.
I’ll admit I’m not the earliest adopter of technology amongst my peers. Part of twitter’s problem, for me, is simply dealing with its large volumes of data. It’s not like we’re in need of it. Emails, web pages, and RSS feeds. Twitter is yet another source to add to the list. My information coping strategy for email doesn’t translate well into how I use twitter. I operate strict, near-to-zero inbox policies, responding quickly where possible to emails, or choosing to digest and never respond.
The sheer volume of tweets sometimes forces me to discard inforamtion much more readily than I’d like and that makes me slightly uncomfortable. I’m surprised how people can follow well over 200 people, even up to 1000s and cope with effective filtering of information. I’m all about the quality, not the quantity and I’m not employed to crawl through that information for my day job.
Still, I’ve found it much more interesting participating in the experiment and seeing where it takes me. I’d be interested to hear from you on how you use twitter, or what surprises it’s led you to.
