On Twitter, where do you start?
There’s been a debate going on the last few days about how “important” Twitter is, about how many regular people (read= non-geeky non-web-obsessed folk) know about it, whether or not it will ever hit a mainstream audience, and so on.
Regardless (and I think it will hit the mainstream, probably in 8-12 months), Twitter is important in the daily lives of many people. So much so that, like me, people such as Louis Gray use Twitter as a way to start the day, to see what’s going on in the world, to collect useful links that trusted “loose” connections have already collected and shared and commented about in short tidy snippets, and to simply check in with the digital universe to say hey y’all, it’s gonna be another day of interwebs tom foolery, now isn’t it.
My own personal Twitter habits have caused me to wonder how others use the service as well. In particular, I’m curious as to where people “start.” In other words, when you choose to follow someone on Twitter, you receive ongoing updates of their Twitter posts. When you do human things that require leaving a computer, such as sleeping, Twitter posts accumulate all the while.
When I have the time, I’ll go back to the last time I was on Twitter, and “read forward” through all the posts that were made from that time. More often though I’ll only have the time to read through more recent posts that were made before I reentered the Twitter vortex.
This again brings up a new feature suggestion for Twitter: add a checkbox next to every “tweet” so that logged in users can mark their place – kind of like slipping a bookmark into a tome before going to sleep – and easily find it again the next time they check back in.
I was a little bit surprised to see that busy people such as Mathew Ingram were inclined to at least try to read all of their Twitter friends’ posts as well. Phillip Winn does the same, though he starts with replies and then “works backwards” from most recent posts to the point at which he last signed off. To this, I replied: “Interesting – I have a neurotic need to read tweets “in order,” except when on blackberry.”
Surely not everyone is as engaged (obsessed?) with Twitter to do this, however. And for people like Jason Calacanis and Robert Scoble, who follow upwards of 20,000 people each, it would be simply impossible to follow updates made while they were offline.
So to recap, the stages of Twitter addiction are:
* You’re a regular person
* You know about Twitter
* You use Twitter
* You use Twitter but don’t read every single post
* You use Twitter and try to read every single post
* You’re Jason Calacanis or Robert Scoble
Please note: with the exception of the Calacanis and Scoble stage (Stage Scobacanis?), it’s all too easy to accelerate through the stages of Twitter addiction!
