July 20, 2008
Posted by Ryan Graves
Twitter gets personal.
Today when Amazon had there little S3 hick-up, the pictures/avatars in Twhirl (my Twitter app of choice) wouldn’t show up. I realized that my experience using Twitter was significantly worse without the picture and I realized that the picture that shows up next to the 140 character message is significantly important.
In the olden days when people would constantly check away messages on AIM the messages were fairly impersonal. Those away message were just left for whoever cared to view it. You had to actually go into each persons away message in order to view it. With Twitter the message comes to you, there is much more of the feeling that the person wrote that tweet ‘for me to see’ versus ‘for people to see’.
Now after using Twitter for a while I now know the people I follow by their avatars and I realized that this avatar makes the tool (Twitter) so much more personal. This personal aspect of Twitter makes the messages worth checking. This is one reason why Twitter works so well, its personal.
Lesson: Keep it personal.
I think people will slowly begin to understand they they are not just posting a comment to a blog but starting or contributing to a conversation. Use this reply for an example, I was very excited to see that someone had an opinion on this topic, thus my response.
Slowly people will see that the internet, blogs, etc. is a two way street. Thanks for the comment!
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