IP Democracy: The Trouble with Twitter

Yesterday I signed up for Twitter to see what all the fuss was about. As it turns out, MIT’s Technology Review’s Jason Pontin has this timely piece today in the New York Times about the so-called “instant blogging” tool which allows users to inform their network of contacts on a minute-by-minute basis what they’re doing.

But signing up for Twitter was as far as I got. Once I fully registered (twitter name msbrumfield), sent a text message from my phone and sent an IM from my instant messaging platform just to make sure I had set everything up properly, I realized that I don’t have much to communicate on an ongoing basis to that many people.

The first point where I got stymied was in choosing my Twitter friends. Hmmm…well, I do have friends and family members, but not that many who are on Twitter, or whom I could convince to join Twitter. I also have business associates and colleagues and fellow bloggers who are on Twitter, but do I really want them to know the minutiae of my my mostly uninteresting (to them, I would suppose) days?

And here’s another problem: I sometimes do things that I want only a very few close personal friends to hear about and I sometimes do things that no one ever gets to hear about. In other words, even if I had enough friends and colleagues to “tweet” on a regular basis, I don’t want everybody to know everything about me. And if I were to leave something out from my stream of tweets, I would feel, well, secretive or duplicitous.

Or as Pontin put it

But I also strongly disliked the radical self-revelation of Twitter. I wasn’t sure that it was good for my intimate circle to know so much about my daily rounds, or healthy for me to tell them. A little secretiveness is, perhaps, a necessary lubricant in our social relations. I wondered whether twittering could ever have broad appeal.

So, right now Twitter is a communications tool for only those people who have tons of trusted friends and who have nothing to hide or keep private. How many people fit that description? Not very many, I suspect. Or as Pontin puts it, it’s not clear if Twitter has enough universal appeal to be a successful business. He’s skeptical and so am I.

Posted by Cynthia Brumfield on April 22, 2007 10:53 AM to IP Democracy