Why do people hate twitter?

Twitter is a simple message-based system which is easy to use, practical, API-friendly, free and most of all: it asks the simplest of questions: What are you doing? – So, why do people hate it so much?

I talked to some people about this service and the answers were basically these:

1. I never heard about it.
2. I know what it is, but don’t really use it.
3. This is my twitter username: @______.
4. I hate it!

All the answers satisfied me, except for the last one. Not that everyone has to like Twitter, but I was really curious why so many people actually hated it, and the only conclusion that I could come to was that people hate the 140 character limit. People who usually hate twitter don’t have anything useful to say that can fit under that limit, so they simply ignore the service…

Twitter is about posting what you’re doing and replying to other people’s status messages, but of course you can use it for pretty much whatever you like, as long as you keep it under the “budget”. I’ve actually seen a conversation between two people I was following that took a whole afternoon. Wasn’t that why IM was created, so you can have an online conversation with another person? Or is twitter becoming a second generation IRC?

Twitter Apps

Now you may not like twitter, but you can’t say you don’t want to use it because you don’t like the website!

Thanks to the Twitter API, which is basically a series of HTTP requests that return XML information, you can pretty much use twitter on any platform you want! There are dozens (hundreds, maybe?) of applications out there that satisfy almost every single user out there, no matter if you’re on a PC, a Mac, mobile, PDA, etc.

Another great use of the twitter API is to combine twitter with other services! You can have, for example, a plugin on your WordPress blog that posts a message on twitter whenever you post a new entry on the website. This way you can keep your followers up to date!

Journalists are using it more and more each day, not only to post news but mainly to fetch them! People usually post about something as soon as it happens and twitter is the perfect channel for that information to travel at light speed!

Tweeting at your desk: Adobe Air FTW!

This is usually the first thing I recommend installing when talking about twitter. Adobe AIR is a platform for web-based applications that work as normal desktop software. The great advantage of this is that it works on almost every operating system available (Windows, Linux, Mac, etc)!

With it you can send your tweets through TweetDeck, twhirl, or any other Adobe AIR application you can easily find with a quick google search!

On the go!

This is where it gets really fun! Besides the SMS service and mobile website version that twitter already provides, there are a number of applications available for all kinds of mobile devices, so you can tweet whenever you want, wherever you are.

The current phones I work with (usually for development) don’t have GPS, so I can’t confirm this, but from what I’ve heard some applications can get your GPS coordinates and set them as your Location. There are also other services that provide this and can even work side-by-side with twitter, like BrightKite.

In conclusion, never forget: whatever you’re doing, I’m sure there’s a tweet you can post about it!

What are you doing?

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