Good and Bad Tweets

Posted July 16th, 2009

I was without internet at home for a week and the same thing that saved me when I was without Internet is keeping me from catching up from my week-long outage.

Twitter.

When I was restricted to communicating with the outside world to my iPhone over 3G, the 140 character limitation was great. It's kind of like the Burma Shave signs for our day. 

Long emails, or those that required long responses were too much to handle. I'd clear as much as I could in daily trips to a local coffee shop. Unfortunately, I was stuck waiting around the house much of the time for the folks who were coming to fix the internet connection.

I've thought about trying to follow the advice here at  http://sentenc.es/. As you can see from the links at the bottom, you can choose from two to five sentences as your preferred length. The philosophy is that you should write email like it is SMS.

This is how Guy Kawasaki uses Twitter.  There's no way he could follow that many people, and he doesn't. He explains that he follows everyone and doesn't read their timelines. Instead he responds to direct messages and public messages. 

Brilliant as an email replacement. Instead of a restriction based on the number of sentences, Kawasaki is using Twitter to limit his communication with people he doesn't know to 140 characters.

I can't seem to tear myself away from people's Twitter timelines so I have to limit the number of people I follow. I'm thinking of writing an application called Stalker that lets me determine who I follow and how but that's a whole different story.

I'm now reconnected to the world and now Twitter has become a force for evil and not good. Where last week it was my method of connecting to the world, this week it is what stands between me and getting more done. 

I've gotten my inbox under 200 but it's all the big ones. The more than five sentences ones. I'm sure that I could have responded to more of them but I find myself drawn back to Twitter.

What did we do in the pre-Twitter days? I suppose we looked at ebay, read the Wikipedia, searched Google and read blogs. My friend Craig finds Twitter unsatisfying — but he likes to read books.

Oh wait. So do I. Maybe that's what I should be doing whether my internet is up or down.

This post originally appeared in the Pragmatic Life blog.