use twitter?

even better.

i resisted twitter for a long time b/c i couldn't see any possible way in which it would be useful (and frankly, i'm kind of over knowing where everyone is all the time). about two weeks ago though i decided to try it out since i have a hefty amount of friends/colleagues who use it.

i'm pretty meh about it, but think there are certain ways in which it could be used interestingly. when paired with hashtags, all tweets about a certain topic get housed in one place. during the course of the mumbai attacks this week i used the service to get a better sense of what was actually happening from moment to moment (vs. after news has been filtered through beaurocracy and censors). (http://hashtags.org/tag/mumbai) and to see what news other people were looking at.

i thought it might be good for the neighborhood b/c one could, say, tweet out 'party at barrette is slamming' or 'i just walked into fermented grapes and they're having a tasting right now' or 'i just got jumped on sterling' etc.. and you wouldn't need to be near a comp. to do that (a lot of the time when i get back to my machine and want to post about things they're long done). so far the nice thing about twitter is that you can go look at it whenever, but it doesn't really intrude into your daily life unless you customize it to.

of course everything can be abused and people could over-post, but if you're not looking at it, it doesn't really make a difference.