Twitter and all things Twittertastic

'Not here / Not here the darkness, in this twittering world.' Thus wrote T. S. Eliot, that best-known anagram of toilets, in his 1935 poem 'Burnt Norton'. Of course, Old Tom could little have known that, nearly seventy-five years thence, a micro-blogging site called Twitter would be the new big thing in the world of the Internet, following hot on the heels of the success of Facebook, Youtube, Myspace, and all of the other more or less universally known sites the World Wide Web has produced. But here it is, and 2009 has undoubtedly been the year of the Twitter.


Whether 2010 will build on its success, or whether the Twittersphere will implode under the weight of its own cultural importance, nobody can predict. But since I'm an arrogant prognosticating penishead who likes to do that sort of thing anyway, a sort of cut-price prophet, I think 2010 will be a very exciting year for Twitter. More and more people are joining every day, and at a cumulative, geometric rate, it would seem: one need only check the followers list of a popular tweeter like Mr Stephen Fry to see that. Where he once had ten thousand new followers a day, he now seems to get double that number, and it can't all be attributed to the new series of QI. But the Twittersphere must watch out: for every person who joins Twitter and becomes a regular and enthusiastic tweeter, there must be ten (I haven't done the maths, forgive) who join and never (or hardly ever) tweet (again).

So, is Twitter a fad? Of course it is. Look at Myspace: who but the most unpulsefingering musicians actually still use their Myspace, or even own one? Not I, said the Walrus. And Facebook? Well, people may still have an Arsebook page, but why go on there and effectively 'tweet' your goings-on to fifty or a hundred 'followers' (your 'friends'), when you can (if you're me, which I'm sure you're thankful you're not) go on Twitter and tell a thousand people what you're doing (as I now can)? Okay, so many of them won't even see my tweets, let alone read them, much less respond to 'em. But that's the great thing about Twitter, and it's what made Myspace always a million times better than Arsebook (whose success and popularity I've always, I must confess, been rather baffled by): the potential, the potential to meet new people and to expand your social horizons. Facebook was never one for random 'friend' adds. And that was its major limitation: after all, if I want to email someone, I'll email them; if I want to get in touch with them urgently, I'll text them. But anyway, enough anti-Facebookery. Where was I?

Undoubtedly this has all been said before, by sorts wiser and more eloquent than I. But just to finish, here are a few reasons why it could be argued Twitter is better than Facebook or Myspace, not to mention Bebo (which I never even bothered to have an account with):

-It's not just about meeting new people, it's about sharing information. As a student of the weird (in literature, that is), this was one of the appeals for me: I knew there were ways of my finding people I would not otherwise have ever had contact with, who had a similar interest in the out-of-the-way writers I like, and of picking their brains about certain books and writers who might even have been too out-of-the-way to have come into my line of view yet. This is still one of the major appeals of Twitter for me.

-It cuts out all the bullshit that made Facebook so clunky and awkward: profile information, friends, silly invitations to join their Farm, or poke them in the nether regions, or give them a cormorant as a gift, and other random and completely pointless ventures. Instead, it's just 'What's happening?' in 140 characters, 20 fewer than a text message (formerly 'What are you doing?'). The success of Twitter is pretty obvious: it's caused Facebook to introduce their tagging system, where you can tag people in your status updates, and the commenting system, whereby people can comment directly below your updates. Does this sound familiar to any Twitter users? Of course it does. And Twitter was there first.

-Finally, but most importantly, none of it matters. It is all perfectly pointless. It's a diversion, it's a way of killing five minutes before dinner, or rewarding yourself after writing 500 words towards your thesis, or whatever. None of it actually matters one way or another: the people you commune with on there, followers and followees, are not your 'friends' - some of them may be in real life, of course, but most people will doubtless be random people you'll never encounter outside of Twitter. If you read a tweet or don't read a tweet, it's not, to borrow the words of dear Mr Toots from Dombey and Son, of any consequence; it's just a way of churning out little nuggets of information to the world.

So there we have it. Time for me to stop blogging and get tweeting. And a big thank you to my 1,000 followers, and let's make 2010 an even livelier, lovelier, and more interesting year for the Twittersphere. Don't put all your feet into one stocking,

O.T.