Paddy Donnelly

A tweet by @Creattica indirectly got me thinking deeply about the purpose of Twitter today.

When I first joined Twitter, almost a year ago, I didn’t really understand the power of it.  Actually the 5 stages of Twitter acceptance below pretty much sums it up for me, and probably a number of you too?

I signed up, played around with it reluctantly for a few days and (not realising it’s potential) abandoned it for months.  Only after getting my hands dirty with it in October 2008 and diving head first into the community did I finally realise what it was all about. Kinda.

In the beginning I found it difficult to determine it’s purpose.  Was this not simply one nanometre away from stalking?  Should we all be recording our every move [like ijustine below]?

Or should we be commenting on the fascinating situations life throws at us with strange tweets like @Takete?

I used it to get more involved in the design community, looking at social media and the evolution of Internet culture for my Masters, while also building up a reputation for myself and my blog.  I managed to interact with the high rollers of the Internet, including Guy Kawasaki, Pete Cashmore, Tim O’Reilly and ProBlogger, and interview them for this blog, all through Twitter.

Over the past few months I have made hundreds of relationships that would not have been possible before Twitter, some of which generated work for me, but the more important ones generated friendships.

Tweet To Self

So back to @Creattica’s tweet, which just re-triggered my first thoughts about Twitter.

I had first looked at Twitter as a way of talking to yourself but allowing others to see what was going on in your head.  In theory, for me, it was a public ‘Note to self’, which could be interacted with by potentially thousands of people.  By making it public, a little more pressure is put upon yourself to react to your thought, rather than push it aside two seconds later.

While Twitter has evolved drastically, and for some people it is used exclusively to chat or promote their brand, I still try to occasionally use it for thoughts and musings.  Wont it be an incredibly fascinating experience to look back upon our tweet record in years to come?  Imagine our children and grandchildren being able to look at these blogs and tweets from us, seeing how we interacted and thought in 2009.

Perhaps to further emphasise which tweets are important to ourselves we should incorporate the ‘Tweet To Self‘ action?  Why not try putting ‘TTS‘ in front of those messages that you really want to implant in your head and have a slightly higher importance than @ replies?

Whether people use it as a chat room, a method of blog promotion, as a way of venting their anger, to pose philosophical conundrums or for market research, it’s all great.  The evolution of this community has been a fascinating one to watch and it’s clear that 2009 will be a very interesting year for the micro blogging sensation.

Follow Me

Don’t forget to follow me @Paddydonnelly to read my TTS. :)