Twitter, month 5

Wednesday, July 25, 2007 by Dave Winer.

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.