The station is back online!
The Social Space Station is a live again! After a temporary parking of the domain with GoDaddy, the domain is now successfully re-registered.
Service resumes …
Tweet as bro!
Twitter is a fascinating social networking phenomenon for people who like to piffle, witter, prattle, gibber, prate or maunder. Not only is it for people who like to talk about the minutiae of their everyday lives and incessantly, it’s for those who like to watch people talk about their everyday lives.
Twitter (jump to the next paragraph if you know about Twitter already) is a microblogging (or quickblog) service started by Biz Stone in which people describe what it is they are doing at that precise moment and all within a 140 character limit (well, obviously everything else other than posting to Twitter that is, because that’s, like, self-evident). The term given to these posts is “tweets”.
Twitter is certainly poplular and well used. You can tell by the media coverage through Techcrunch, Mashable etc. and also by how many other social networking sites now provide default links to Twitter profiles.
From a user perspective, it is a breeze to use. The Website provides a very minimal interface that functions very well. It’s not especially pretty and customisation is limited but these characteristics seem in keeping with the simplicity of the original goal.
One key advantage of Twitter, compared with other blogging sites, is the support for mobile phones. Mobile phones make sense because each tweet has to be short and people do other things that don’t require a computer.
I find Twitter particularly interesting because on casual inspection it seems so pointless and a little creepy; people let the world know what they are doing, thinking or thinking of doing and others monitor them.
Why?
Do they tweet with the expectation there is a ready audience? Do they simply want people to find them that like doing similar things? Do they like thought of others watching them? Do they like watching others? Is Twitter a stalking service?
Perhaps it’s all these things. One thing for sure, Leisa Reichelt’s ambient intimacy, I believe, is the primary driver behind the success of this site. Where these rapid and relentless interactions seem pointless from a casual observer, they are in fact, an essential mechanism for pulling together and redefining society mediated by the online social experience.
Twitter is simply another example of an online experience that’s being seamlessly incorporated into the new everday life. Not as a substitute for physical interactions and expression but as an augmentation of these.
I recommend this article at the New York Times that discusses a recent case where a Twitter user mentions suicide in a tweet and his followers attempt to intervene. I guess the most interesting point in this article is the question about whether people actually care about those they follow or is it the following that they care about.
Finally, a couple of interesting Twitter related sites: The Twitterati blog has ceased to be but it provides are nice archive of recent Twitter related happenings, and TweetVolume analyses tweets for occurences of words specified by users of their site.
