Why I Love Twitter (and will for at least another month)

Photo by iJustine, via flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ijustine/

OK, after a couple of weeks playing with it, I love Twitter. I find it much more yummy than I ever found Myspace, or Facebook (which should be odd, because Twitter is very, very limited in comparison.)

But Twitter gives me a very pure form of that thing I liked most about Facebook (with their status updates): A sense of low-level telepathy. I have a vague idea of what a lot of my friends, and other people I like, are feeling. How their life is going. People who really like Twitter tweet far more often than they update their Facebook status, so the knowledge of how they are doing is more granular, more finegrained. With Facebook I know they're happier, or sadder, this week than last week. With Twitter, I know they're happier, or sadder, this evening than they were this morning.

And the blurring of the line between friend and famous person is democratic and interesting.

Plus, I've never seen a social/internet thingy evolve so fast. It's fascinating.

Does this mean Twitter will change the world/hit a billion users/be around in a year's time? Not necessarily. It's evolving fast in an ecosystem which is also evolving fast. Spam risks ruining it. And every other tech company wants to buy it/kill it/replace it. Anything could happen.  But it's the closest thing yet to the simple, non-technical, magic app that will bring the internet right into our head, so that we can talk to anyone about anything in any language, to solve any problem at any time, so that we will never be lonely again.

This version of Twitter is going to look primitive as fuck within a year. But you, me, it, and the world will be very different in a year. Right now, it's the place to play. (Which has distracted me terribly from my blog, sorry. I've posted something like 89 tweets in the past fortnight, and one blog post.)

Anyway, if you are Twittering, or thinking you might try it, call round and see me sometime.

Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam

There's an enjoyable discussion of spam poetry going on, over at the Guardian Books blog.  I just posted a contribution there, so I may as well repeat it here...

I'm a fan of spam. I like the way that, beset by predators, predatory itself, it evolves with furious speed. I like to have a dip into my spam box every couple of weeks to see the new trends evolving (like the recent "What a stupid face you have" / "You look so stupid in this photo" variations.)

Ben Myers is right on both points, it's a stunning resource for poets, but to make good poetry out of it you have to be a very good editor. Alive to nuance and resonance. I've been playing with spam poems for years. (Not just spam: this week, I wrote two poems I'm very pleased with, constructed entirely from the legal disclaimers on poetry websites.)

By using spam, and other internet debris, poets can essentially outsource free association. But the best comment on the perils of the method comes from W.H. Auden, in a letter to the poet Frank O'Hara, long before the internet:

“I think you (and John {Ashbery} too, for that matter) must watch what is always the great danger with any ‘surrealistic’ style, namely of confusing authentic nonlogical relations which arouse wonder with accidental ones which arouse mere surprise and in the end fatigue.”
-W. H. Auden

If your ear/nose/throat/soul (add to/delete as appropriate) are alive to authentic nonlogical relations, then spam and all the other digital junk of the internet are your friend. They can jolt you out of the deep groove of habit. The first and hardest step in surprising and delighting others is surprising and delighting yourself.