2010 January 18
Well, I’ve started using Twitter under the username pkgw, and I’ve been kind of enjoying it. Right now my timeline is kind of a grab-bag of mostly personal items with some work- related things; I haven’t seen any obvious examples of good ways to keep the two somewhat separate. (As a sidenote, “timeline” seems like sort of an odd word choice to me compared to “feed” or something like that.)
The main thing that I don’t like about Twitter is that its associated vocabulary is so infantile; I feel humiliated whenever I have to say the word “tweet” aloud. But “blog” has started to feel like a a real word, so maybe “tweet” isn’t far behind.
The other thing is that, of course, Twitter is a closed-source web service and I have no idea what their user data policies are. Like it or not, most people who microblog use Twitter, and the social aspects of the service are important, so I’m willing to put up with that. Unlike my email or this blog, I don’t think that I’d be brokenhearted to lose all of my tweets (they are mostly ephemera) so this doesn’t bother me as much as it might for other services.