Linking Life » Are Public Twitter Conversations Really Necessary?

Are Public Twitter Conversations Really Necessary?

Thanks to Geek and Poke for the Comic

When Facebook first was adopted by my friends and family, I was a little weirded out by the whole site. I didn’t really have any use for it. When someone messaged me on Facebook I would instantly respond to them by e-mailing them. I could not (and still don’t think) Facebook is that great of a communication portal. Nothing has really surpassed e-mail for me in terms of organization, workflow and user experience. Facebook can’t even come close to doing that for me. All pet peeves aside, what really irked me about Facebook was my wall. Random friends left random junk on my wall. They would leave a message on my wall for the world to read about what time we were going to grab coffee at. Or the worst question: “how are you doing.” It’s like your standing on stage in front of your hundreds of friends and someone hands you the microphone to answer the question. What ever happened to private conversation?

So I worked my way through Facebook and found out how to disable my wall completely, which plenty of people thought was super strange. That solved that problem. After that, Facebook changed a little bit which made it all about status updates rather than what others put on your wall. So I started using it to post my Google Reader shared items, quotes and a few other things. It worked out well for people to be able to comment on or about something specific without really giving them the freedom to ask me anything I wanted. This is how I use Facebook now. I post something and people can comment on that post. 99/100 this works just right and it’s directed and focused dialogue.

Eventually Twitter showed up on the scene. Twitter brings with itself an entire new way to communicate once again. I still don’t understand why anyone would ever send me a direct message through twitter but people still do it all the time. Twitter also has this @reply feature which in my opinion just replaces the entire annoyance of the facebook wall. Why must we have small talk conversations in public for everyone ever to read? Twitter doesn’t even give us the luxury of replying to a certain tweet or help us keep them organized. It’s just a mash full of @ symbols and random conversations between friends.

So I ask. What is the benefit of public conversation? Twitter isn’t good for real conversation, because you are limited to 140 characters. Twitter allows you to make quick comments back and forth to each other but doesn’t organize them in any way at all. Is it really necessary to entertain every conversation in the public sphere for everyone to read?

I think we need to rediscover twitter as a sharing tool, not as a communication tool. They have many similarities but there is a crucial difference. Before you tweet anything, you must ask yourself “is this beneficial for everyone to read, not just the person I am speaking directly to.” If the answer to that question is no, call them, or e-mail them. As one blogger puts it, Twitter is a public way to have a private conversation. This only has to be true if you let it. Use Twitter for what it’s good for. Sharing things with the public, stop using it like nobody else is reading.