Day One with Twitter: Sockington, the iPhone, Broken Apps and Adult Dating

I admit that I always considered Twitter to be masturbation; a way for people afraid to stay alone with their own thoughts to distract themselves, contributing to the modern devolution of "fame" by planting any kind of flag at all in a visible area.

This impression isn't without cause. A couple of months ago, I was standing in line on 7th ave. in NYC getting a cup of tea in Starbucks. There was a girl in front of me tweeting away on an iPhone (I could see she was on the Twitter website)..."I am getting coffee". "I am ordering coffee". Yes, while standing in front of the counter attendant, this person was making us all wait while she tweeted this activity before ordering her coffee. Let's not try to say this is uncommon; if you were to quantify it, I'd be willing to bet at least half of Twitter is filled with such dreck. No doubt, Twitter is a big enabler of crossing-the-street-without-looking behavior.

Fact is though, I'm into technology, and I started to see people I know and respect get interested in Twitter. From a development standpoint, they have an API, which means I can build apps that integrate it. Add it up: people are flocking to it, you can integrate it via the API, all the tech blogs are following it, I'm an app developer...

...I have to learn about Twitter, and the best way seems to be to sign up and start tweeting. After a day of it, I thought it would be interesting to blog my perspective before I joined the Twitterati. I will no doubt blog on the subject again, it'll be interesting to see how my perspective evolves.

I came to the conclusion to get on the tweet wagon (twagon?) while noshing serrano and manchego at a local Spanish restaurant's bar area, where I was reading TechCrunch and Amazon Daily on my Kindle 2 and once again seeing several Twitter stories, one that mentioned an iPhone app called Twitterific, which seemed to have a lot of appeal. 

Note: A Kindle 2 and an iPhone is enough to keep anybody busy for a few hours, and is so much more civilized than breaking out a laptop in a public place. Funny thing is though, with the leather cover, if you're in a restaurant, people think you've been staring at your check the whole time.

Mid nosh, I got urgent: why wait? I broke out my iPhone, pulled Twitterific down (paid version, 3.99), created an account at the Twitter website (Twitterific's "Create Account" interface doesn't seem to work, it just asks you to log in--erm, I don't have an account, that's why I'm trying to sign up--I had to go to Twitter.com to create an account, then go back to the app and enter credentials etc.), and there I was, tweet-enabled (tweenabled?).

Twitterific greeted me with a cute little bluebird next to a popup telling me I had 100 new tweets, and an audible "tweet tweet" sound, which I really liked, it was very welcoming; the app has a light-text-on-dark-background look, very polished, and lots of ways to search, follow, move channels (or timelines, or whatever you call different threads, my jargon is still weak), and so on. From a UI dev perspective, I liked it a lot, and must say I enjoy Sockington's battle with the enemy pillow.

A lot of people tweeted that they prefer Tweetie though, mostly due to speed. So I pulled that one down (2.99 I believe), and signed in. Right away I thought Twitterific's UI was better for me; it's more appealing and seems to expose more of Twitter's functionality. This might show my Twitter noobishness (twoob?) since speed doesn't really matter to me now--we're talking a few seconds, and as I said before, frantic texting/tweeting (twexting?) irks me--so at least for the time being, on iPhone, I'm a Twitterific user, with Tweetie as backup.

To get started, I tweeted my Kindle blog article. Then my meal came and I shut down. After some wine and a finishing up my reading for the day, I walked home and called it a night.

Lo and behold, this morning, I had two followers already: Blogging 101, which I thought was great, and another user, whom when I clicked to see the profile, turned out to be...

...AN ADULT DATING SERVICE. Immediately blocked of course, but it showed me the ugly side of Twitter. People are abusing it in a Craigslist sort of way. The intent of this user, who undoubtedly has a custom app using the Twitter API to scan tweets and follow them, or just really dedicated staff, was to have me click through to an adult dating site where I could probably have a "massage therapist" come over with drugs for a sniff 'n rub, and who knows, stab me in the neck and rob me. What fun! 

Anyway...

...today I got on Facebook, and shot out an update, "Follow me on Twitter and I'll follow you, tcoz_tweet". I wasn't sure if this was right-think, but meh, why not. One of my friends responded, "Isn't Twitter and FB redundant?". 

Ah, I thought; I'm not the only person out there unfamiliar with Twitter. I responded that no, it wasn't, but you really have to try it to see why, it's sort of hard to explain. I guess I'd sum it up as, "With Twitter, anybody can follow your status updates, sort of like walking by a newsstand and reading the front pages as many times a day as you want; you don't have to be invited. FB is more like letting somebody into your house."

I know; Twitterati will say UGH how basic, Twitter is so much deeper than that, how dare you trivialize it...ARGH /tweet "IYAM PIZZED http://tinyurl.com/pizzed"! You have to start somewhere though, and since this is how I understand it, and it helped me get there, it seems a fair way to lay it out to the Twitter muggles (twuggles?).

You know, I might Tweet that. Accurately and clearly describe Twitter, so that anybody can understand it (so watch your shortspeak), and how it differs from, but enhances, FB. If anything interesting arises, I'll post it.

Moving along, I found that yes, you can connect FB and Twitter via the FB Twitter app. GREAT, I searched FB, found it right away, went to install...

...and it's broken. Nothing but a blank page shows up. On the About page for the app, people are complaining with the usual WTF IZ BOKEN sort of post that surely has FB tech support giving thumbs up for detail and clarity and is clogging up the Twitter ruby-on-rails Unix boxes. Bah, I thought; I guess I'll have to wait for the zen of FB-Twitter integration, and in the meantime, will just have to status update my FB friends to follow me at tcoz_tweet on Twitter.

So, at the end of one day (actually more like 16 hours) of getting into Twitter, that's where I'm at. Off to tweet this blog post.