Wednesday, August 29, 2012

a tweet a day...



I dont have many original thoughts. Or even if i do, they flash in and then get auto-erased. probably the reason why the blog has been inactive for so long! considering how miserable my experiences were with blogging, i did not fancy another disaster, so i decided to give twitter, the online micro-blog, a safe skip.
plus the fact that almost everyone i knew were on facebook, made my decision that much easier.

another reason i gave myself was that i had shitty internet connections in college which really did not merit me being updated 'in real time'.

but after joining work, with a super fast internet connection at home and office (and ample free time at hand!) I decided to give twitter a shot.

the beauty of twitter is that it is deceptively simple. it gives you 140 characters to say anything you want to say. so you type it and press the tiny bird icon to 'tweet' it to the world. voila.

but what they dont tell you is how incredibly hard it is to figure out what to say in those 140 characters!

Like any noob to twitter, i began with following the standard 'big-guns', Sub Swamy, Suhel Seth, R Sardesai etc etc and soon their tweets started pouring. For almost a week i just kept reading their posts without tweeting anything back, and it was fascinating!

only after spending hours scanning through tweets did i realize that twitter is giving us a telescopic view into that person's thought process. by cutting out the verbose prose, the advts, the intro and the conclusion, each tweet is like a nugget of pure information. whether it is useful to you or not is a different case altogether!

another fancy concept in twitter is that of 'following', you get to follow anyone who interests you and that way you will be assured of glimpses into what they are thinking through the day. vice versa, you can be followed by people who find you interesting. an elegant way of connecting people or rather their thoughts.

Two symbols which form a major part of tweets are '@' and '#'. The '@' is used to address any twitter member as a sort of a public conversation, while '#' is used to index the content of your tweet to a certain topic.

THese two things - following and the special symbols - are responsible, in my opinion, for the revolutionary effect of twitter in our lives. by such simple instruments twitter enables an actual real time conversation with people across the world. you may not know their names, their faces or their likes or dislikes, but for that #topic, you know their minds. by opening up the conversation to the whole world, twitter has scored where facebook and other social networks have failed. facebook is built upon the framework of a friend. and if you are not someone's friend, the conversation is a no starter. agreed, facebook was not created with the intention of being a multi-node conversation enabler, but that just makes twitter all the more special!

finally, anyone following the new HBO series, The Newsroom, would have got an idea about how much and how fast twitter is changing the way people report the news. one of the first experiments i did on twitter was comparing the time to report the news between news websites and twitter and for each big story including today's Kasab verdict, twitter scored big time! if you follow the right people on twitter, you could be one of the first persons in the world to know that piece of information and also you can retweet it and actually BE a part of the news process. something that makes tweeting, not just a fun pastime, but a social responsibility! :)

as a last word, i really regret not having taken to twitter before and i wish more of my friends join the bandwagon, but as they say, there is a time and place for everything. i am happy to finally be a part of the twitterverse and i dont think i want to leave any time soon! 

Love,
AV