The twitter thing

I have so many online presences at social websites these days (Orkut, LinkedIn, Geni, Schoolbank.nl, Hyves) that I thought I'd add another: Twitter. It has been getting a lot of attention recently, since it is apparently a great way to monitor where well known people are during conferences.

I've been putting my activities on Twitter for a few weeks now. And so far I'm not really sure what the benefit is, either for me or for others. That might of course have something to do with the fact that I've set my profile to be only visible to friends, of whom I don't yet have any on Twitter.

But what I see from Twitter currently is that it is yet another way for you to tell people what you're doing. It's pretty much like a mini version of many personal blogs. So lots of messages are of the type "at the grocery", "on the bus to work", "stuck in traffic", "having fun with Dunya and Desi", etc.

The problem is that I don't believe in most of those personal blogs. Some people might find it interesting to read about one another's love life or their adventures at work, I only care about that type of story when it's exceptionally well written. Which -unfortunately- doesn't happen very often in the blogosphere.

I'm not saying that this site isn't personal or that it's well written, because I indeed often share my personal opinion in a rant-like fashion. But at least occasionally I try to write something that might be useful to some people in the community, or some personal opinion that could be interesting to someone else but my loved ones. I'm not sure if I'm succeeding at those things, but I think I have a better chance here that at Twitter.

"Grabbing cup of coffee"

Oops, sorry. That of course should have gone to Twitter.