cruel to be kind

The tool
Via Mail I received a link to TwitThis:

TwitThis is an easy way for people to send Twitter messages about your blog post or website. When visitors to your website click on the TwitThis button or link, it takes the URL of the web page and creates a shorter URL using TinyURL. Then visitors can send this shortened URL and a description of the web page to all of their friends on Twitter.

Let’s give it a try:

MY thoughts on it
First: Great and easy thing, I do like the coloring. Has a popup and a direct posting to twitter.

But: I hate it when I have to give another website an information like login and password. I do not care if they say they will not do anything with it (which in this case they don’t).

Second, if I am a vivid twitterer which way round will it go? WIll I have a lot of people twittering about MY page or will I have a lot of pages I will want to twitter about?

So far – I may have overlooked it – I have not seen a tool which takes the current website *I* am visiting. It can’t be that complicated for TwitThis to add such a bookmarklet as well and then they would cover every side ;)

And why does everyone use tinyurl instead of a service which uses less characters – did I miss anything there?

Fascinating in itself but will not drive me much more into Twitter
Although I do not use Twitter a lot, I find it a fascinating topic because of the effects around it. I do see a lot of possibilities, but also a lot of limitations. It fits with the attention deficit culture we are heading for at the moment and increases the speed a tenfold. Actually, the Twitter craze gets me closer to just hit “mark read” on my unread feeds after nearly 10 days off due to me being at Cebit. I think it puts this development on speed and we will crash faster and harder now as Twitter is accelerating.

Also I am amazed by the amount of tools which spring up from Twitter, but equally amazed how often they only go half way.

In the meantime I am still struggling with Google Reader as it does not seem to catch all entries in the RSS files for twitter and I want to read them all in one batch not on the twitter page but in a normal way. And no I will not read them on my phone.

So where is the “take the public feed of a person, check every five minutes and then mail every hour the updates”?

A lot of tools, ideas and ways spring up like crazy. It is kind of like springtime for nerds. But basically it is just heading forward, moving on instead of taking closer looks at what could be done with it and what can be cleverly combined. A pity.

Which leads me to the conclusion: Twitter is a silo. One with a lot of bells and whistles, but a silo, and for the moment the users find it sexy enough to stay with it. I on the other hand miss updates on people, because they do not blog “best of” anymore which would force me into reading Tweets just to keep up to date.

But actually, I am just doing fine missing out on you. I myself rarely post more than once a day on there, though I might increase that for the specific purpose of being in the states in April because THEN there is a use for twittering more. And then I expect people to unsubscribe from my twitter – because they do not care about what I say chatting right away. ;)

Tag(s): twitter, twitthis, attention deficit, spring for nerds

Tags: tools