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Pings from your posse
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Real-time messaging is fun or crazy, depending on your point of view, if any, says G.B.S.N.P. Varma
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Photo: A. Roy Chowdury
What are you doing? One doesn’t have to be physically together to widen friends’ circle now
Back in 1837--- c’mon, mate, its still Anna Domino--- Henry David Thoreau made his first journal entry. He wrote in his journal the descriptions of plants and animals he encountered around his home and in his wanderings. He wrote about his acti
vities, beliefs, hopes and emotions. His journal writing and his life work as a great nature writer started with an innocuous question from Ralph Waldo Emerson: “What are you doing now?”
A journal entry reads: “We are conversant with only one point of contact at a time, from which we receive a prompting and impulse and instantly pass to a new season or point of contact.”
Ever-new point of contact
Now that we don’t have Emerson or his ‘avatar’ (mind you, there was no ‘Second Life’ then, or else we would be having him ask us that now also), how about a website asking us: “What are you doing?”
Well, Twitter.com does exactly that. It invites every one to answer that and practically blurs the online and offline worlds. In the fluid world of social networks that craves portability, Twitter is, by providing ‘a seamless layer of connectivity across SMS, IM, and the web,’ as Biz Stone, Co-founder, Twitter, puts it, creating a terrific buzz among people. “The idea is pretty darn good,” says Twitter-er G. Vijay. Twitter lets you post brief updates, limited to 140 characters, about your everyday thoughts and activities. “It’s cool and fun to get tweets from your email, IM services, cell phones and Facebook,” says Ravi, who is a loner at heart and party animal at head, and a software developer for whatever is worth in-between.
Just like other social networking sites, once you open a Twitter account, you are given a personal page. You can invite your friends by giving them your account details to join or ‘follow’ you. (A ‘follower’ is someone who indicates others as following and receives all updates about them via email, SMS or IM, according to how the ‘follower’ specifies it.) You can also post (on your web page or send the post (tweet in twitter talk) through IM or mobile phone. You got to register your IM client and mobile number with Twitter.
Many a time, it is a running scroll of every titbit people do, like, ‘coming back’, ‘miss u ya’, ‘heading to office’ and ‘fagged out’; it’s the tiniest pieces expressions you don’t know how to figure them out. The sheer banality of shared inanity can overwhelm and turn users off. Maybe, the cumulative effect of messages helps us.
Tale of experiences
Carloline Middle Brook, the author of Big Juicy Twitter Guide, narrates her experience with Twitter:
“I first encountered Twitter at least a year ago. I loaded it up and watched the activity on the main Twitter page. All I saw was a seemingly pointless stream of tweets that literally documented every movement of people’s daily lives down to the unnecessary detail of what they were eating for dinner! I tried sending a few updates but nobody was following me so I was just talking to myself. I played with it for a couple of hours and then ignored it for a year or so. Twitter is now being recognized as a valuable marketing tool…but here’s the thing - you don’t have to listen to the incoming noise! You can ignore it if you choose to. Unlike email, Twitter is just ‘fly on the wall’ communication. On the other hand, if you have people following you, you hope they are listening so you can get your message across.” Well, mate, what are you doing? “Reading this” “Thanks”.
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