Scripting News: Twitter, month 5

Scripting News, the weblog started in 1997 that bootstrapped the blogging revolution.

Twitter, month 5

Another idea that's gaining maturity, and therefore perspective, is Twitter. It's now been almost five months since we fell in love with it. By "we" I mean a handful of people in the tech blogosphere, enough to create a critical mass of people to network with, enough so we can explore what it's like to have a spam-free pub-sub channel for direct communication.

Twitter filled a personal gap that I created, unwittingly, a couple of weeks before I started using it. On February 27, with no announcement or fanfare, this blog switched from a mixture of long-form and short-form blog posts to all long-form. And then in March I started using Twitter, and it's become the place I use for short-form posts.

Twitter also serves the purpose of what I used to call "email bulletins." When something newsworthy would happen, or if I wrote something special that I wanted a lot of people to read, I would push a bulletin to people who subscribed. Nowadays I push them to the 1539 people who follow me on Twitter. And it works. When I do it, there are 200 or 300 reads from the people who directly follow me, and 25 or so reads from the main page of Twitter.

I have yet to figure out Facebook. Something about it doesn't make me want to go there often to find out what's new. Not sure why I'm not attracted to it and so many others are.

PS: I seem to have discovered Twitter on March 14. Here's my first post. I clearly didn't understand it at the time (and said so). By Day 2 it's already starting to make sense. "What matters about Twitter, btw, is that people are using it." Throughout March and April are epiphanies on Twitter.

Last update: Thursday, June 3, 2010; 4:01:17 PM

~About the Author~

Dave Winer, 55, is a visiting scholar at NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. He pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software; former contributing editor at Wired Magazine, research fellow at Harvard Law School, entrepreneur, and investor in web media companies. A native New Yorker, he received a Master's in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, a Bachelor's in Mathematics from Tulane University and currently lives in New York City.

"The protoblogger." - NY Times.

"The father of modern-day content distribution." - PC World.

One of BusinessWeek's 25 Most Influential People on the Web.

"Helped popularize blogging, podcasting and RSS." - Time.

"The father of blogging and RSS." - BBC.

"RSS was born in 1997 out of the confluence of Dave Winer's 'Really Simple Syndication' technology, used to push out blog updates, and Netscape's 'Rich Site Summary', which allowed users to create custom Netscape home pages with regularly updated data flows." - Tim O'Reilly.

Mail: scriptingnews1mail at gmail dot com.

Jun Aug