How much does Twitter mean to you?

Aug 07

PhilTechnology , , , , , , , No Comments

I am sure that hundreds, if not thousands, of other bloggers have gone in to the merit of Twitter, and how it can be used in every day life, work, etc. So what I wanted to say, fairly quickly, is how much it means to me.

What has caused a lot of the twitterers, tweeps, tweeple or whatever we should respectfully call a collection of Twitter users, shudder and evaluate the importance of the service to them, is the Denial of Service (DoS) attack on Twitter and Facebook yesterday, and which they continue to fight at this moment (some API features are still broken apparently).

My first thought “Twitter is down, I must tell people. Oh no, I can’t tweet, Twitter is down! Now what do I do?”. I felt a bit helpless so I Googled it, obviously, then blogged about it yesterday, even though this is a brand new blog, and I am the only one reading it…

About Twitter and Me

I view my Twitter stream a few times a day at the very least. If I am on a break at work, or lunchtime, or sometimes in the car park of the venue I am training in (if I get there early enough), I will check Twitter on my iPhone. That is, if O2′s data network isn’t down again, it has been really flakey over the last few weeks. Does this make me a Twitter addict? I don’t think so, from what I can tell, this makes me an average user of Twitter. There are far more manic minded people than me when it comes to Twitter usage.

On my iPhone I use the fantastic and free Twitterfon. This lets me favourite any tweet I want to go back to, if I want to read a tweet or more often a web page or article it links to, I can save it to read offline on my iPhone/Desktop with the fabulous (and free!) Read It Later account link, and I can Reply, re-tweet, and do a lot of the things I would do back on my Mac (where I use the excellent and resource-friendly DestroyTwitter).

All of this allows me to keep up to date with those people I think are worth following, major events by following news agencies and just general Internet memes or fads, in one place. And I like the place too, that’s what really helps. Twitter is easy to use, understandable and fun. I am going to sound really cheap as well because it is also free, at the moment, and probably will be in some form for the foreseeable future.

In fact, I used to check hundreds of RSS feeds every day, but now I hardly ever open up my feed reader. I just find out if someone is on Twitter, or generally I don’t bother to keep up to date with them. I have a Facebook account but find the whole thing messy, hard to use and unattractive to a great degree.

So there, as if anyone in the world gives a care, that is how I was affected by Twitter’s massive outage yesterday.

Try This
For more fun, have a look at this hashtag (if you don’t use Twitter, a hashtag is like a keyword that you add to your tweets, and then people can search on that hashtag and find all related tweets about that keyword). It makes for some humorous (and frankly, sad) reading: #whentwitterwasdown

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