Totally Twitter

I used to be at the forefront of technology. By this I mean I read a magazine on mobile phones every few weeks, but in a world where everyone I knew was ‘what-ever-ing’ what was coming out, or making up things that had no chance of coming out, I liked to think of myself as a voice of reason and knowledge in the pre-tweet world.

Unfortunately though, Twitter has had me reaching for my piece of stone with which to etch a picture of a rather thin gazelle on my cave wall. I’ve been using it for 3 days and I still have no idea what the ‘hashtag’, ‘at’ or ‘respond’ commands are likely to lead to: Will I be posting / responding to one person, a trend or am I just spouting my mouth to nowhere (I’m good at that though, so no worries there) Moreover it moves so fast, it gives me an idea of what a commuter train, in Tokyo during the rush hour, at Christmas might be like (cultural insensitivity noted)

I do like it though, everyone is trying to deliver one liners at a rate so incalculable that the last ‘1 sec’ of postings can be as long as a newspaper article, or in the case of a popular item, a H.G. Wells novel, and be just as varied, imaginative and downright humorous.

In short: so far so good. It’s been a while since something changed everything (or changed it, ‘again’), ignoring of course, Apple, Facebook, Linked-In etc, but if these are all on a level playing field, Twitter gets the panache award for its seamless alliteration opportunities: Twitter-tweets, Twitter-trends, Twitter-twats and more recently, with our super injunction business ruffling a few blue feathers, we welcome the age of ‘Twitter-Truths’.

It’s all so, oh so, easy on the ear and the uses demonstrated against governments in the Middle-east and celebrities looking to keep their dirty laundry safely stashed could mean we’re seeing more than just another passing social networking fad – After the heat it poured on illegitimate governments and the way it made temperatures rise in the house of commons after the Ryan Giggs incident, we could well be witnessing in Twitter, a communication version of fire 2.0, so great is the way this has already changed things.

All that remains to be seen then is what kind of cage will this little blue bird put around itself or more importantly what cage governments will thrust upon it. Perhaps it’d do well to jump before pushed, lest it learnt the same lessons that felled the metaphoric other ‘bird’: Icarus.

Right or wrong as any of that may seem, the communicative landscape has change and there is far more content in this pixelated creature’s birdsong.