by Fran Feldman
My daily routine is much different than it used to be — before Twitter. Sixteen years ago, when I embarked on this digital journey, I woke up, threw off the covers, ran to the computer, opened my AOL email account and looked longingly at my incoming mailbox hoping for news from virtual friends.
Now I roll over, check the clock, pick up my iPhone, tap the Twhirl icon and see who’s been saying what in the Twitterverse while I’ve been asleep. Twitter has become my lifeline to instant communication. It’s always on. Well, it’s always on as long as it’s not suffering technical difficulties, which was once both the scourge and the cuteness of Twitter.
Long before I became hooked, when I was merely a Twitter registrant that often went days without firing up the app, the one thing I was aware of by way of both Tweets and various blog posts was the down time of the burgeoning social media tool. Seeing the multitude of complaints helped to keep me from becoming too involved. Sure there were people I wanted to keep up to date with, but did I really want to know that they were looking for a new coffee shop and what if when I went back to see if they’d found the perfect replacement for their soon to be shuttered Starbucks I was met with the all-too-familiar Fail Whale, Twitter’s outage icon?
It’s reported that the Whale is known for it’s Canary-like twitter. Awww, how clever, until you can’t send those all important 140 characters that have been knocking around in your brain for hours, being edited and tweaked for just the right message to go out to your loyal minions.
What if that Twitter friend has found the most perfect shop for coffee that carries a rare Guatemalan bean that has yet to be discovered by the masses and I want to check and see if there’s one by me and when I navigate my way into Twitter I am met by that cute, adorable Fail Whale being carted off by little canaries?
Things could be worse. Or they could be far better. For those of you that aren’t drawn to Twitter just yet, I would like to predict the future. A future in which Twitter has achieved a five 9’s uptime. Where we speak with friends, family, celebrity in short thoughts … just 140 characters or less, but without using abbreviated SMS language. A future in which news is delivered in real time to our hand held devices or other computers with pictures and video and commentary in a Q&A format. A future in which customer service can be managed from anywhere in the world, including the good old USofA because overhead will be minimal in terms of technology infrastructure. A service any company can offer with employees telecommuting from their home, or on the road from their phone.
A future … but wait, the future is now. This is all happening today and if you’re not here, if you’re not present, you’re not in it. So take a few minutes, navigate over to Twitter.com and register an account. Look, if I can’t convince you, perhaps Guy Kawasaki can or maybe Robert Scobel or Gary Vaynerchuk, CNN, Comcast, WholeFoods or … well, you get it.
And with the advent of automated Twitter events, some of which are just plain annoying, I can see the potential for good to come from automated Tweets. For example, you are getting ready to head to the airport, your phone is nearby and you hear the alert. When you pick it up and look at your Twitter app, you see that there is a major traffic jam on 95 and you’d better get in the car and off to the airport sooner rather than later so that you don’t miss your flight. If radios can communicate traffic tie-ups to police and news outlets, surely it can be done for Twitter.
The list of ideas and Twitter users is enormous and growing exponentially every month and if nothing else, in 140 characters or less, It’s the trendy, challenging and fun new way to waste time and it can be done on the cheep.