Unsynchronized

10 October 2007 | asides, internet living, microblogging, this, twitter | No Comments

I’ve discovered that I like Twitter a hell of a lot better when reading what people wrote all at once, rather than receiving the constant barrage of updates. For a digitally-oriented yutz like me, this might be considered the first sign of aging. I’m fine with that. I do not want to be always-on.

I bring this up because over the last few days, I’ve started to miss Twitter. That’s weird, in the sense that when I quit it, I did so because it was exactly what I didn’t need, and I didn’t see the long-term benefits (or rather, I understood what people saw as long-term benefits, but didn’t see them as benefits). In short: it was too easily something for people to talk at me and not with me, which is not how I think we should be communicating in general.

What I miss, I think, is a place for short observations that for whatever reason I feel the need to get out of my system, despite my earlier feelings about that sort of thing. Twitter is specifically designed to accept that sort of input, which is why it feels right putting that sort of stuff there. But let’s face it, people following my twitterstream did not need to know in real time that I was once again having issues with one browser or another, or that I was telling someone that I was wearing boxers, or whatever inane/witty thing I thought was witty/inane at that moment.

The visually-excellent WordPress theme The Morning After brought the idea of asides to my attention, which I guess Matt has been doing forever but I never really researched, shame on me. That seems like the perfect thing for this here weblog, given that I’m thinking about a redesign, but putting them inline seems like asking for mediocrity, given how (un)often I update here. This place would become 90% asides or more in no time. Forget that. And a sidebar seems… I don’t know, too kitschy?… since everyone’s all widget-happy these days. I don’t know. Either a solution will present itself or I’ll get over it. Either way.

Leave a Reply

You can follow the discussion through the Comments feed. You can also pingback or trackback from your own site.