Tweet Tweet: Is that the sound of change for a Blogger?

I have finally taken the plunge. I am on Twitter now.

I was not a virgin at the social networking scene. I already have Orkut and Facebook accounts. Agreed, that I use them less now than when I first began, but one thing remains unchanged—in my mind, I always treat my Orkut and Facebook accounts as platforms to have a conversation with someone, kind of like a public chat room. Twitter to me is more about expressing my little thoughts without necessarily having a conversation. My first “tweet” was not exciting at all: I let the world know that I was going to leave my office in 5 minutes, because my in-laws were coming from India. I didn’t think this information was going to be important to anyone in the world. I was not communicating with anyone to make a plan through my tweet, but still, writing this down and seeing it published on the web felt liberating.

This communication without any specific purpose is the fuel that runs the social networking engine. I have really close friends (including family members), who just don’t see the need for social networking. These are people whose company I really enjoy. But I can clearly see that they don’t get anything out of the experience of social networking without any specific purpose. My personal viewpoint is, you are not forced to use social networking. It is a tool to cater to you, and if you can use it to your advantage, then why not? After all, social networking is still free!

Lately I have attended some high-visibility silicon valley conferences where venture capitalists and tech company executives were pulling their hair out thinking how to monetize this phenomenon of social networking. But I don’t think anyone even dreams of charging the users money for accessing the social networking sites like Orkut, Facebook, Twitter and others. There is just too much competition for the patronage of the users. But people are taking notice at the behavioral patterns of the users that emerge from their social networking footprints. Even video game company CEOs admit that they recognize people’s need to connect socially, and as a result, the famously individualistic traditional model of video gaming is evolving into a more socially-connected playfield, where each player is interacting not only with his/her machine and the virtual characters, but with other real players (often friends rather than strangers across the internet) playing simultaneously.

Coming back to Twitter, I posted three tweets today…all related to my professional field (which is intellectual property law, if you must know). So far I have only used LinkedIn for web-based professional networking (and often for a purpose), but I can see how Twitter can make that social/professional demarcation fuzzy. After all, a thought is a thought, whether personal or professional, and if you happen to be on Twitter at the time that the thought occurs, you are going to tweet, whether you are at home, or at work. I know people set up Twitter profiles devoted to focused topics (including focused professional topics), but I am too lazy for maintaining multiple Twitter profiles. So my tweets are for sure going to be a hodge-podge of whatever is going on in my life.

One thing I am interested to see…is Twitter going to kill or at least influence negatively the blogger in me? After all Twitter is not only about social networking, it is about microblogging too. Till now, I have only blogged when I have had a topic which was at least moderately substantial. Fleeting thoughts sometimes begged to be written down, but if they didn’t fall under the umbrella of a theme, I couldn’t entertain them to be included in a blog. I also blog when I feel like a rain cloud: so heavy with unreleased words in my brain, that writing is the only way to feel light again. I guess Twitter is going to provide some sort of shelter to those flickers of random thoughts, and there is a real chance that I will experience frequent catharsis, and will not feel the need to unburden myself through a blog as frequently as I do now.

Well, flash fictions didn’t kill short stories. May be blogging and micro-blogging can co-exist too. I have to wait and watch myself. And what’s more, I think a middle ground will emerge. Twitter has this 140-character limit, so you are forced to keep your entry short and succinct. But what if you need a little more room to complete the story? There is a program called Twitzer (a Firefox add-on) that shortens your text so that you can go beyond 140 characters. There is a real chance that someday somebody will offer a formal platform for mini-blogs.

Until then, happy tweeting (and blogging).