Don’t be a twit!

I’ve been Twittering for a week now. You know. The micro–blogging site where you can follow (or listen to) friends and complete strangers, and they can follow (or listen to) you in return. Where you can snoop around to check out whether Matthew Buckland is more popular than Vincent Maher, or if Mike Stopforth has more followers than Justin Hartman. Then you can look at Hugh MacLeod’s tweets and wonder how he got more followers than there are people in his home town. Or Robert Scoble who has more people listening to him than God.

During my first day on Twitter I was all fired up and gung ho. I started following all the king’s horses and all the king’s men. People in Tokyo, bloggers in different time zones, columnists I had absolutely no interest in. I must confess in all my excitement I followed people solely because they had groovy names, wore weird sunglasses, or purple hats, for goodness’ sake.

Before long I was following half the world. Which is great if you want to get followed yourself, so that people don’t think you’re an abject loser with zero social networking appeal. People are horribly kind on Twitter and mostly reciprocate the minute you start following their stream. That’s unless they are members of the e-lluminati (that clandestine group of digital heavyweights who secretly control Web 2.0), in which case the world follows them and they only follow God, Jesus Christ and the Scobleizer.

The only problem with the land grab approach is that while you become popular pronto pronto, you’re flooded with the most inane, useless information in the world. I soon found out that I actually don’t give a toss whether Jizzwhala is having vegetarian polony in San Francisco for lunch on Tuesday, when last RubyT picked her nose, or that JasonJuba has just updated his blog site featuring cute kittens and is now feeling a trifle fluish.

For me the real value in Twitter was realised when I started following people whose opinions I find interesting, people who are thought leaders, who break news online or whom I want to watch as a collective to see how they relate to each other in a social group. Given I now write a lot about new media, it’s been an interesting exercise in sociology to watch the who’s who of the Web 2.0 world interact online, to see what they are thinking, reading, doing, blogging and saying to each other. A lot is ego piffle, but when you sort the wheat from the chaff there’s value to be had.

Twitter is in its infancy and I believe the real value in the site will hopefully come as applications become more useful and the technology matures. To keep ahead of clones like Germany’s Wamadu, Japan’s Mogo2, and the Franco/German Frazr, Twitter will need to add a layer of sophistication. As a user I would love to see preference lenses so that I can sort South African from international streams, and then slice and dice streams into personalized categories.

Then in a hectic, rapid paced world where there is so much to do, but so little time, it would be great to apply the Twitter concept to life, the universe and everything. With Twitter you only have 140 characters to say your say. Now just imagine if you applied this concept to, for instance, the New York Times Top 5 Paperback Business Best Sellers:

1. The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell: What makes moments of critical mass? Ideas spread like viruses driven by the influential few, stickiness and the power of context.

2. Getting Things Done, by David Allen: Free your mind of remembering tasks, so you can focus completely on getting those tasks done.

3. Go Green, Live Rich, by David Bach: Fifty ways to make your life, your home, your shopping, and your finances greener while achieving financial freedom.

4. A Whole New Mind, by Daniel H. Pink: Abundance, outsourcing and automation dominate the conceptual age in which creativity is the only real competitive differentiator.

5. Rich Dad, Poor Dad, by Robert Kiyosaki: Two dads. Respected (financially illiterate) academic who dies in poverty and a drop out who becomes a self-made millionaire. Save, invest, own property, protect your assets.

Instead of taking five months to read that lot, you’ve got the key thrust in five minutes.

I say let’s Twitterise all those literary classics you’ve never read but should have, purely for the snob appeal. Twitterise boring staff meetings, motivational videos, client briefings, presidential speeches, the chairman’s letter to shareholders in all annual reports, and openings of parliament. In fact why not Twitterise all corporate, political and personal snooze fests that hold high ego appeal yet offer very little value, so we can spend the rest of our life doing things we really enjoy. Like spending time on Twitter.