140 characters of resistance.

It's not hard for me to admit when I'm wrong. In fact, I suffer from a chronic lack of confidence in my opinions, so believing I'm wrong is actually my default setting. With that said, I want to admit on these pages that I was wrong about Twitter and its usefulness in my life.

I started out using Twitter for purely academic purposes; I was conducting research for a paper about how the 2008 presidential candidates were using Twitter to communicate to their "followers." At the time, Twitter bored me. I didn't get it. I didn't think the candidates were using it in any particularly interesting way; it was as if they'd simply been handed a "Politics Web 2.0" starter kit and Twitter fit nicely in the Microblogging compartment. My guess at the time was that voters who were aware of and using Twitter didn't need to hear from Hillary Clinton that she'd be making a speech at their local Barnes and Noble that day; they probably already knew. Of course, this was just a hunch, and while many innovative research papers have been predicated on a mere hunch over the years, this paper in particular needed some quantifiable data to back up my theories, so instead, I looked at how often (and to how many followers) the candidates tweeted.

After I finished writing the paper, I still saw no use for Twitter.... and then a funny thing happened: people I really like started to use it. All of a sudden, I used Twitter all the time! I didn't always post what I was doing (after all, I hold fast to my contention that my friends can't possibly care about the contents of my breakfast), but I sure started reading it a lot more often. I even signed up to receive tweets on my cell phone so that I could hear up-to-the-minute news from my friends as they walked through their lives in boston and DC.

So, I would like to admit that I was wrong. Like many things in our lives -- especially communication technologies -- a narrative needs to exist for why we should incorporate a new habit, some compelling reason to nudge us in another direction. For a long time, that narrative just didn't speak to me.... and then one day it did.

(I would also like to take this time to state for the record that I think Twitter will be dead within six months, or at least left in a shallow roadside grave once a better / shinier new technology comes around.)

http://twitter.com/boobasket