So Far About Twitter

David taught me another new word: Tweeps.

Tweep - (n) Tw-Ep. A friend or person on Twitter with whom one shares information via 140 character posts to a continuously updating website.

It's a couple of weeks and about 200 updates into Twitter for me. I've been reserving opinion because shortly after my joining their primary server crashed. I take no responsibility for said crash. But they're back and seem to be more stable/less overloaded. I'm not continually heading over to Is Twitter Down, which I take to be a good sign.

The service is kind of like a ton of asynchronous conversations all at once. It's interesting to be able to keep up with some people who don't blog all the time or don't blog personal stuff and I've been able to cheer for a few friends. But it's hard to know if your Tweet makes sense if it's been an hour since whatever it was you're responding to and there's a lot of stuff I'm sure we could all do without.

There are aspects I do like--the somewhat asynchronous fashion being one of them. I can go back a couple of hours and "catch up on my Tweeps." I like the more personal nature of many of tweets--I've followed along as an elderly neighbor has received help, meetings with bosses have gone well, burn out has been avoided (or at least ranted about), and a lot of steam has been blown off in little nibblets. And I like that at this point I seem to be able to walk away without too much angst. I was mostly offline all of last weekend and while I was worried about my email inbox and somewhat frantic about the size of my feeds--I was okay with Twitter going by the wayside.

The problems are there: the site isn't always stable; how long does it still make sense to respond; just how witty can I be in 140 character snippets.

It's an interesting raw stream of consciousness and while I'm not sure I'll be quite the heavy user some of the people I follow are, it's an interesting tool. At least, until summer reading takes over my brain and I'm totally non functional til August.