Are you using Twitter? I actually have an account but I’ve never really looked into it. This morning I was listening to the lead developer being interviewed on The Web 2.0 Show and I got the feeling that Twitter may be something worth looking into.
To be honest, I’m not really an active socializer on the internet and I barely even use IM anymore. However, there are some good reasons why I’d like to become more active and probably will now that I start working with stuff I’m passionate about.
It’s all about networking which is a pretty stiff word for making friends. Using the word we make it sound like you’re connecting with people you can use but it’s of course much more than that. I certainly hope so, at least.
That’s the reason why I stopped hanging out at places like MyBlogLog. People make it all about business, attracting traffic, and it’s just got that false feeling all over it. So what do I want to get out of socializing? I mean, ideally?
The keyword is "interesting". Of course, attracting more visitors would be nice but it can’t stop there, that’s just dull. What I’d like is to meet interesting people who give me interesting comment on my stuff, which produces interesting ideas.
This goes both ways. Online socializing should take us to interesting people and sites where we can gather around crazy and interesting thoughts. This is the ideal from a personal standpoint.
Today I switched the side notes at my Apple blog for Twitter updates. As I mentioned, I’ve never actually used Twitter before but it seems to make sense. Not because I want to draw visitors by socializing but because the blog itself socializes with it’s users and becomes more dynamic.
Social^(Usersn) + Dynamic = Web 2.0 and a more interesting internet.
Something along those lines. However, there’s an aspect of online socializing that I don’t like, which is that we ultimately end up depending on all these sites, such as Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, Digg and so on.
Let’s say you upload and tag your photos on Flickr to have them in a central accessible location where you can show them to people. You do the same thing with your bookmarks on del.icio.us. It all looks fine and neat but before you know it, you end up losing control of your own stuff.
That may not be that bad after all if we put our trust in these apps. I’m a great believer that online services and applications will grow insanely the next few years and that they’ll become a large part of all our lives. I’m just saying that I’d much rather be dependent on a technology than a service.
There’s a big difference here. When we use what I call a technology, like email or an IM protocol, we can switch application as we go along. A service, on the other hand, is just a service.
Anyway, that goes beyond the scope of this blog post, which is by the way coming to and end. Basically, what I wanted to say is that I’d like to become more active on the internet and hopefully we’re soon going to see that happen.