My Experiments With Twitter Part 1

This post is the first part of my take on Twitter.

Even though I started a twitter account some 4 years back, I became active and got addicted to it in the past few months. Getting introduced to Twitter without any previous knowledge about it, is like a 2 year old baby being gifted with a playstation.

During a study leave, I created an account. I wasn't left with a choice of username/handle I had in mind, so was forced to take a weird handle. Then I tried my best to understand it. But by that time, study leave got over. So I abandoned Twitter. Actually, I had totally forgotten about it till the recent study leave! I’m sure that many of you had the same experience. But this time I got a study leave of around 2 months, including 10 days of Onam vacation (Advantage of belonging to Kerala), original study leave of about 2 weeks and postponing of exams (thanks to CALICUT UNIVERSITY!). So I decided to explore twitter and understand it better. That’s how I officially entered the wonderful world of tweets!

This post covers some of the advantages and disadvantages of Twitter.

Advantages

1. Simple layout
2. Less  complicated design
3. Easy procedures
4. Simple to use
5. Privacy of personal information (if you prefer that)
6. Most of the present-day cellular phones have inbuilt apps for twitter
7. You can capitalize any letters of username/handle unlike Facebook. No issues such as 1^st letter not capitalized, too many capitals etc.
8. Capitalization doesn’t affect the destination of reply. Eg: instead of @ aNU_9_10_90 you typed @Anu_9_10_90, it still reaches @aNU_9_10_90
9. Ability to follow celebrity updates
10. Let them know what you have to say. Even if they don’t reply, they will read it, provided they know twitter well
11. Rarely, get surprised and delighted to see them reply to your tweets to them (depends on the person you tweet.  Detailed descriptions in later sections)
12. Can verify accounts of important people (though presently Twitter has stopped the verification facility)
13. Any idiot can have followers provided you follow and follow back everyone (will come to the details in later sections)
14. Improve leadership quality (Having followers implies that you are the leader!)
15. Communication with different kinds of people from across the world without revealing your (and of course, their ) identity
16. Simplicity of sharing information (following, followers, tweets, retweets and favourites)
17. Ideas can be expressed in just 140 characters. No need of bloody explanations as in exams
18. Help us to be very efficient with words
19. Teach us to become point-specific
20. Make us capable of using given resources efficiently (and thereby)
21. Train us to manage crises

Disadvantages

1. Only 140 characters allowed in each tweet
2. Chatterboxes cannot survive here
3. Username is restricted to alphabets, numbers and underscores”_”.  Spaces and characters like .#$*>” etc. not allowed
4. Most of the usernames you have in mind would already be in use, finally being forced to end up with some stupid, long names with underscores “_” and numerical characters, like aNU_9_10_90 (that’s my DOB)
5. When replying to or mentioning someone, their username consumes a part of the allowed 140 characters. Eg: if you re replying to aNU_9_10_90, then you type “@aNU_9_10_90 blah blah blah” 13 characters are consumed by the handle
6. This problem occurs mainly with accounts of important people. You cannot be sure whether the account originally belongs to that particular celebrity unless it is a verified account or any of the tweeple (twitter+people) confirms it with the original person.
7. Twitter for mobile phones is not available for all models unless there is an inbuilt app
8. This disadvantage is mainly targeted to the male audience. Gals are less in Twitter (maybe ‘coz we gals find the restriction of 140 characters extremely difficult and bullshit!)

Ha! If I had taken this trouble to write my exams, I would not have had so many arrears to my credits!!!

More details of Twitter to be covered in the coming post……………………