Sunday, January 31, 2010

on twitter

























A mate of mine is in deep for Twitter. Sometimes it seems he kind of believes in it as a semi-salvific force. I came closest to his position at the height of the protests in Iran last year, when twitter was one of the few media by which folks in could communicate with us out.

But Woody don't twitter. I tried it for a while, but soon found that I felt like a dog being wagged by its tail. Libraries were starting to twitter big in the Spring and Summer, as I was finishing up the book... but I just never took twitter seriously enough to give it serious discussion in Bldg3.0.

Ironically, when I started writing it in 2007, MySpace was still a big deal. Since it had been one of the hottest flashpoints of my professional life (and it came to be something of a symbol for what I thought we could try to do to reach out), I spend some time on it in the book, along with Facebook. Facebook's star continues to rise, but MySpace is understood to be something of an online trailerpark. Too bad. And since I've lived in trailerparks, I still kind of feel soft-n-warm toward MySpace culture.

The lessons and principles apply to other 2.0 venues.