milkypink [dot] net

There are few things that piss me off more than people claiming that twitter was “not made for” trivial updates like where you are eating, what you are doing, what random thoughts you have.

I’m sorry, do you really think that you can be super profound all the time, in English, with just 144 characters? And that’s only the limit if you’re not replying to someone.

Oh, and of course it’s “bad form” to post multiple tweets in a row so you can say something that doesn’t fit into 144 characters without falling prey to the dreaded sms shortening disease. (Deck.ly provides a small solution to this problem, but I’m sure there are people RAEGing out there because they have to click through to read the whole message.)

Twitter is for posting whatever the hell you damn want, okay?
It’s a microblogging service, not a pretentiousness contest.

I don’t follow people because they write profound things. You want profound? Read books. Read blogs where people actually take the time to craft beautiful sentences. Sure, there’s a certain amount of cleverness required to write something without using aggravating abbreviations like “u” and make it fit within the limit, but beyond that…. I really don’t care.

I follow people I know or just like because I want to know what they’re doing, even if it’s something as “trivial” as “just had a delicious cupcake” or “doing mountains of laundry today” because it helps me feel close to them as a person. You want to keep that shine of untouchable, perfect admiration? Don’t follow anyone on twitter.

Yes, it’s better if people keep a measure of self-control (seriously do not need to know about your bathroom habits) but that’s true across the internet. Twitter accesses that impulsive need to share and magnifies it for the world to see, but that doesn’t mean it’s all bad.

Perhaps I have this view because I’ve never perceived twitter as a “get famous” tool – famous people tweet, but people don’t get famous for tweeting (on the whole – I’m sure there have been a few, but that’s not why I’m on there, and that’s not the kind of person I’d follow).

At the end this ultimately boils down to the same thing that any act of writing does – know your audience.
Create another twitter account if you need to (I’m looking at you, people who run twitter accounts for a particular site but then fill it up with your personal tweets!) – compartmentalism is not bad. Trivial is fine – life is made up of little things (sometimes I think fiction makes people forget that – not every day is about saving the world or doing something that will change history forever). It’s important to treasure little things and to enjoy sharing them with people you care about – because I’m pretty sure at least one person is really interested that you had a delicious cupcake (especially if you took a picture of it before eating!).

You want to be profound, be profound (or newsworthy, or always funny), but don’t belittle the everyday in the process.
The everyday has value. It always will.

Being a bit of a scatterbrain with a short attention span, I adore microblogging. Twitter was my first step into 140 character-limited madness, and I fully abused the sms option after joining. My activity on the site fluctuated as is typical for me, but then kind of dropped off as Twitter’s stability started to wobble. Clearly people were catching on to the fun of one-liner-blogging, which was good, but also bad. Downtime increased, errors were common and at one point you couldn’t even go back through your history to look at old tweets. It was getting more and more frustrating to use – you’d post, but Twitter wouldn’t recognize it, your 140 character thought lost to the ether of the internet.



There were other microblogging services of course, the ones I used included Jaiku and Pownce (now closed as of Dec 15th 2008). Neither of them really caught on for me, although I was a little sad to see Pownce go (it let you upload & share files with friends!). Jaiku’s main fault was not really accepting Japanese characters, which is a big ( ｉдｉ ) for me.



And then… there was Plurk. Somehow, the move to it felt natural, and I’ve made a lot of neat friends through it, but I haven’t abandoned my Twitter either, so I’ll explain the +/- of each here:



Twitter

+ simple interface – just type, send, done.

+ lots of 3rd party apps for mobile phones and computers

+ sms option

+ can follow your favorite famous personalities (or their fake counterparts)

+ everybody and their mom should know about it by now

+ spamming is ok. what I mean is, posting lots in a row, no real penalties (although I think there is flood control)

- spamming is technically ok, so you can get people who are a little too excited about twittering and end up telling you things you don’t want to know. This is a problem related to all microblogging services, but it can’t be ignored.

- even though you can reply to people, it’s kind of difficult to manage a thread since you don’t always know what tweet someone is replying to

- Twitter is like shouting into the void and hoping someone shouts back – the way it’s set up is very individualist. Good for following news, not so good for making friends.

- Serial adders run rampant. You can prevent random people from following you by protecting your updates, but it’s all or nothing – there’s no way to be selective about which tweets are which.



Plurk

+ creativity in posting – using verbs like says/likes/hates/wishes/has takes a little getting used to, but can be a lot of fun to play around with

+/- karma is a challenge and a reward – you’re active, you gain karma. (conversely, if you aren’t active enough, you lose karma, which can be frustrating)

+/- spam is controlled by karma… kind of. If you post too much you can lose karma! An odd idea to be sure, but I can see where they came up with this plan of action…

+ since the interface is designed very much like a chatroom, it’s ridiculously easy to have a conversation with someone (or lots of someones!) without losing the thread

+ continuing on the above, it’s much easier to get to know people in this format!

+ privacy options! individual plurks can be public, private or varying levels of protected (you can specific the users on the spot! no need to make specific filters if you don’t want to) however you can’t change this once you’ve made the plurk – you either have to delete it and start over or grin and bear it.

- no sms option as of yet, although IM is possible.

- there aren’t a lot of good 3rd party apps for plurk yet

- plurk is less well known, so if you’re begging your friends to join a microblogging service, they’re less likely to want to join one they’ve never heard of…

- plurk recently has had more downtime than I’d like, but it’s nowhere near as disastrous as Twitter got during my transition… not yet anyway.



Sometimes, I really do feel like spamming my microblog and chatting away into the endless, unforgiving chasm that is the internet, and plurk would penalize me for it. So I use my twitter. Although these days, I don’t actually log in to the main Twitter site, but into Socialthing! instead. ST lets me post to Twitter (and plurk, through Ping.fm, if I want) and since I’m already watching my Twitter feeds there, it’s convenient. Occasionally I do log in to twitter from my phone, though.



More about Socialthing!…
One of the big reasons why I joined is because it lets me see a feed of my flickr contacts’ latest uploads. I find it hard to keep up with everyone’s pics on flickr directly somehow, so this is an easier format for me. I’ve also got Twitter, Plurk (my plurks only), and Last.fm (my scrobbles only) on Socialthing, even though most of those aren’t that helpful since I already know what I’m doing… XD

Yeah, that’s how I feel about a lot of things XD Like PG *points to sidebar* love it. I had an account for MONTHS before I did anything and I totally should have started when I joined but I was lazy and then forgot about it XD
At least I started using Twitter as soon as I found it.
But mixi’s the same way! I could have definitely made way more friends if I’d used it when I was actually IN Japan. I mean, I <3 communicating through the internet but being able to do that AND hang out with people in person? Yes please! Ugh I'm so stupid XD But I'm using it now (even though sometimes I'm a little confused by the slangy things people say/confuse myself based on knowledge I have about something)... I should've probably timed things better though. I posted at a random point and the week I was gone must've been the week everyone had time off or something because I got about 10 new replies the week I stopped checking it XD (Not to mention standard replies by people I was expecting them from.)
As I wrote in the mixi, weather's been wacky here (x__x) from 60F and nice to 40F but feels like 33 the next day... ( > >) At least it didn’t snow…. ha ha….
Been doing some huge catching up with manga, mostly 名探偵コナン. I’ve finally surpassed the anime!
Also been making jewelry a bit since I finally got some beading wire that was stiff enough to make earrings out of (the kind I bought was more for necklaces). Once I decide on some designs I’ll probably take some photos :D