The Great Twitter Experiment of Late 2008

As fol­low­ers of this blog — you few, proud peo­ple — already know, I have restarted my Twitter account and am attempt­ing to make some use out of it. This lit­tle exper­i­ment of mine has been going on for two days now, and I’m find­ing it much more enjoy­able than the first time, mostly because other peo­ple I know are actu­ally using Twitter now.

This has been my prob­lem for some time now. I’m an early adopter. I read the tech blogs, find the next cool thing that just went into beta, sign up for an account and explore. Usually, I don’t spend much time with these star­tups because they are in beta and no one else is really using them yet. (This hap­pened for me and Twine, for example.)

Yet this time is dif­fer­ent. Twitter has “matured,” just as Facebook has. And by matured, I mean that mil­lions and mil­lions of peo­ple have started using it, most impor­tantly, peo­ple I know per­son­ally. That adds a lot to the social net­work­ing expe­ri­ence — you know, actu­ally con­nect­ing with peo­ple you have met in real life.

So the Twitter exper­i­ment goes on. Perhaps this time it will last.