Anything too much is bad.
Their solution: cut it. Make it 140 characters apiece.
And that, dear folks, is the essence of Twitter. And Twitter is only but one of the hundreds of microblogging sites that exists as of this moment. Not really a challenger of the traditional blogging (such as this one) but an entirely different field, in my view.
Imagine that one: you have the liberty to post anything you’d like and as many as you like under one condition: that you only have a short, limited space to work with for each post you make. And right now, millions of identities- from celebrities to churches to companies to average Netizens – are using this kind of blogging simply because it’s a convenient way to connect with other people. And by that, I mean really convenient; a far cry from the old snail mail.
Microblogging has revolutionized the industry in a lot of ways. For one, because of its aggregate size, posts are easily sent into a large audience in seconds, thus paving the way for real-time news dissemination. It could also be used as a communication medium within organizations (which eventually leads to improved social and emotional welfare of the workforce units using such a tool) or even just between friends in a similar way that online conversations via chat provides.
On the other hand, think about it this way.
Take Twitter, for example. Virtually 90% of all tweets comes from a mere 10% of its users (talk about your Pareto Principle). And they are either quotes or minutiae.
I’m not going to leave myself out; more often than I usually like to think of, I do post stuff that people would possibly care about. Nevertheless, because micro-blogging (or in this case, “tweeting”) is so convenient to do, everybody just does that. And that includes people who share really random stuff from what they had for breakfast to what song they’ve been currently listening to.
Obviously, it’s something that’s essentially pointless in itself, making an online personal bulletin-diary that everyone could read (provided that they would even think of doing so). Because when one looks at those stuff, why would ask sooner or later [granted that you're not really stalking at your crush (love is too strong a word) or what-not], why would I care about these?
Now, I did mention about stalking. There’s a matter of violation of privacy in this particular case, which people have obviously put down while they broadcast their lives to the world as much as they want to. Micro-blogging means that you’re talking nobody and to everybody. A form of catharsis, if you like to put it that way. But perhaps, it could be for a lack of attention or the absence of someone to share stuff about. But I’m neither a psychologist nor an anthropologist (though I’d like to be one); just how I think of it.
Another thing is that it could turn out to be a fodder of narcissism and exhibitionism. Celebrities sharing a few tidbits of their lives is tolerable; now people who like to know some of that. But what about average people doing the same stuff- even crossing the line between simple sharing to overt detailing?
Bite-size yippity-yap. Is this the type of thing you’d like communication to evolve into?
Perhaps, I’ll stop here and you could watch this one instead:
