A comment on Ask the Wizard’s post about obviousness bemoans the non-obviousness of a particular social network’s use:
You wouldn’t happen to have a video you could link to of that person who showed you Twitter being valuable. Why? Because I (still) don’t get it…
I know how he feels. I still don’t get MySpace, and according to Rick Rubin it’s already on its way out. No wonder I’m starting to feel old.
It took life events to really make me understand Twitter; it took actually fiddling around with it and trying to use it. A more committed Luddite would have bowed out long before I did, and I could hardly blame them. During the last Glastonbury festival, I twittered the events happening around me at a much smaller festival near the Ascot racing ground. My friends at Glastonbury twittered back. Later on, Janet McKnight was to exclaim: “oh! I thought you were making your festival up to be part of the gang.” That aside, as we were all telling each other what we were up to at these large, disparate, staged events, it dawned on me that we’d basically built an add-on to the Glastonbury Festival, without having to deal with the odious Michael Eavis, and I thought: I get Twitter.
That’s a specific instance, of course, but in a more general sense Twitter is providing a narrative version of where you’re at, a real-time way of positioning yourself—and reading off the positions of others—in terms of what you see, hear and smell rather than in terms of a longitude and latitude. It takes all those narratives and binds them together: or not, if you don’t want.
So maybe they should market it as the alternative to an address book: “if you liked knowing where your friends are currently living, you might also want to know what they’re currently up to.” Or how about: “Twitter: the RFID tag for the soul!” Actually, that sounds a lot more sinister than chicken soup.
