567 Updates, 101 Following, 78 Followers

In a previous life, we used to work for an early dot.com. How early was it? When we joined, it was considered he height of sophistication to have our own domain name. Back then you could actually have a site that was www.hostingcompany.com/mysite and make a go of it. The people who were online then knew what they were doing were more interested in what you had on your site than where it was hosted, or even how it looked (we landed this job by having a plain text, no tables, no images website. Yes, this was a long time ago).

Back then to find out about good websites you would actually read magazines like PC World, and if they featured your site you actually put a logo up saying that you were featured. When I started there we had actually just made their top 100 list. We were chuffed, and happy, and very proud of ourselves. Next year, we made it again! We were all excited until we noticed that they were using an old screenshot for our site, and that the link pointed to our old domain. We had just bought our own domain name and while the link would still work, the Internet was changing. It was obvious that all the magazine did was look at their old bookmarks, say the site was still good, and then move on.

Fast forward 15 years, and now we're on Twitter. We've made 567 updates, follow 101 people, have 78 followers, and in the end nothing has changed. You can dress up your site no matter how much you want, but you always want to make sure that people are talking about what you did yesterday, not last week or heaven forbid last year.

Twitter is big. It's hot. It's shiny. Everyone wants to be on it. Everyone wants to talk about it. In the past two years it's grown for an geek's platform to something that celebrities name drop. The more we talk to people about Twitter the more we get asked, "What is it and what do you do on it?" The truth is, we're not much closer to answering that in a nice elevator pitch way.

We can tell you what it's not.

It's not a blog. It's a micro-blogging tool, but it's not a blog. A blog is a conversation, a thought explored, an opinion, an idea, a rant. Twitter is a sitcom: it's a few brief, fully contained points that when stretched together form the rough outlines of a plot but for the most part are just set pieces hung on wire.

It's not a news outlet. It's great for breaking news. We've been using it lately to keep up on subway updates, some tech news, and protests in downtown Toronto. It's great to find out that something happened, but it's not a great way to get a deep view of why it happened or what has happened since. When a gentleman pushed a couple of teens onto the subway tracks in Toronto a month ago, Twitter helped us find out something was going on and to try to find an alternate route. When we tried to find out what really happened, it was like a game of Secret where "There was an altercation on a platform" became "explosive diffused at station".

It's not a way to make money. No matter what Jason Calacanis and other social networking marketers might tell you, you're not going to get rich on Twitter any more than opening this website is going to get us a book deal. It MIGHT, but chances are pretty small. If you have something to promote, you already have a gold idea, then Twitter is great to promote that idea. But Twitter is not the vehicle for that idea. A billboard may make more people come to your store, but it's not going to sell your wares.

So what is Twitter. We at The Times have found it to be a good way to promote this site, to keep up with breaking news, and occasionally set off a little rant like a digital primal scream. Is it handy? Yes. Is it useful? Not yet.

What sets it apart is that it is the first real social media application where the web use is a minor part of it. What Twitter really works as is a way to make a sort of universal text message. Like a text message, it enables a quick short simple way to communicate an update or promote something. Unlike a text message, it is platform independent. You don't need to have a phone, or a website, or a browser, or an app exclusively. You can consume the information from Twitter in any number of ways. In fact many applications like Tweetie and Destroy Twitter actually provide a better experience than using the web front end. Twitter also need never upgrade its service or feel the need to add new features, because the charm and allure of Twitter is the fact that it is a simple idea executed simply. It's found the one thing it is good at, and it is working at doing it very well.

So, we've identified what Twitter is not, and what its charm is. In the next post, we're going to look at it in comparison to other hot web properties and try to understand why people feel the need to compare them and their services when it's quite easy to see that Facebook <> Twitter <> Google.