Twhy Not?

[flwyd]

When sandbar asked where everyone on LJ had gone, I said they'd probably migrated to Twitbook. With RSS feeds down last week, I noticed that a lot fewer people are posting to my friends page than, say, two years ago. I've shared my distrust of Facebook before, but as an outsider, Twitter's made a good impression, despite the stereotypical ridiculousness of tweets. So if you like, you can follow @flwyd. If you'd prefer not to, I won't take offense. The proximate reason for signing up is to have a single feed for people I want to follow rather than each twit's feed separately in Google Reader.

What I like about twitter:

• By default, everything is public. That means people can participate without joining. (You may have noticed I don't make protected LiveJournal posts either.)
  
• There's a handy API for accessing all that public content. That way, anybody can come up with clever ways to turn tweets into birdsong.
  
• The medium is restricted. Great art often comes from tight restrictions. It's also neat to see creative solutions to limitations in a communication medium.
  
• To match the simplicity of the medium, the interface is clutter-free. (Compare to Facebook or especially MySpace.) The API encourages folks to make interfaces that suit them even better.
  

Things I don't plan to do:

• Tweet what I'm eating for breakfast, how many emails I got last night, or that I'm taking a shit. Not everything that matters in the moment matters in the memory.
  
• Automatically repost my Twitter activity on LiveJournal. If you want to read my terse tweets, you can do so from Twitter (or an RSS reader). If you want to read my verbose blog posts, you can do so from LiveJournal (or an RSS reader).
  
• Use Twitter instead of e-mail or instant messaging. Seeing out-of-context replies on Twitter seems kind of jarring, so I'll try to make my replies amusing to a passing stranger.
  
• Start texting. I still dislike the U.S. mobile telephony ecosystem, particularly the absurd profit margins cell phone companies make on SMS.
  
• Give Twitter my GMail password so it can figure out who my friends are. Just add me manually; my Twitter email isn't in your address book anyway.
  

I've subscribed to a few staff-run twits (@whitehosue and @TheOnion) and a few famous people, plus a few folks I know personally. I reserve the right to unfollow anything that gets annoying or lame. Feel free to follow me; if I don't follow you back it's not that I don't like you, it's that based on your recent activity, I don't want to read everything you say. But I'll still respect you more than the two sex spam accounts that were following me within minutes.

I don't plan to use LiveJournal any less (not that I have much room to fall after my post count in July and August). It's been a long time since I posted quick updates about my daily life here, anyway. I anticipate LiveJournal will still be my best place to work out thoughts by typing out loud.