Thing 31: More Twitter

First, I have to follow up on my last post about Delicious. In the "I have to see somebody doing something before I realize its usefulness" department: just after that post, I went to a meeting of local library colleagues. One of them is developing library subject guides using LibGuides, a newish tool for developing library subject guides (that I wish we'd look at.) In his subject pages, he's using Delicious tag clouds to provide links to useful websites by subtopic (it's not live yet, so I can't link to it.) Now this is an application that makes sense to me. I do have a couple of reservations - I'm not sure I want the "group mind" to prioritize recommended websites (although I'm interested in trying it out), and I don't have too many guides where "websites" is a category. I tend to group things by content (industry overviews, demographics, etc.) But it's an intriguing idea.

Twitter. You know, I'm just not a Twitter person. Maybe if I had more current mobile technology, and/or were online more. I don't have the dexterity to text on my cell phone to begin with (not to mention trying to read the small display.) I don't have an iPhone, or a BlackBerry. My cell phone is a Nokia, no camera, with a font that's about two sizes too small for my eyes. I can't remember where the backspace key is. Maybe this sounds lame, like I'm some klutzy antique who just can't figure things out. But it seems to me than some responsibility for usable interfaces falls on the designers of these technologies, and why do I keep hearing stories about people who hate their cell phones.

I'm not going to do mobile twittering. I could do email, but I'm still a day behind on my recent work email (the price of taking a real day off), and I'm three days behind on my personal email. Doggone it, it's the gardening season! I've been in the garden, not online!

I've looked at some of the Twitter options, and examples. I like the idea of Twilert, that gets you updates on product availability. I can think of several times recently I could have used that (I wonder if I could get to a store in time to get an item before it's sold out?) And TwitterSnooze, which lets you "hit the snooze button on your verbose Twitter friends" (I could something like that in Facebook.) So I'm at the Denial/Presence, "I don't get it, but I have an account" stage of Twitter. What do I think Twitter is? I think it's a scene from the radio play "The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy," where our hero Arthur Dent is vainly trying to communicate something, and no one quite gets what he's saying.

But one thing I can say about these last several weeks of looking at new tools: sometimes the "killer application" has to hit me on the head, by seeing somebody else do it, or by letting it percolate in the back of my head until the connections are made. Sometimes I really do Get It.