Twitter Addiction

Over the weekend, one of my good friends celebrated his 30th birthday. Naturally, a birthday party was held and friends invited to help celebrate. A long time, mutual friend of ours, who currently lives in Los Angeles, rightly used the birthday party occasion as an excuse to fly to Phoenix for a few days and visit with the gang. Now my friend from Los Angeles, like so many others, is an intelligent and smart individual, yet is occasionally challenged technologically. This is not a negative by any means; just simply a state of being. (Plus, after this morning he may also choose to read my blog. ) Recently, he purchased the Jesus Phone and has spent the last couple weeks getting accustomed to the device. Since the strength and popularity of the iPhone is arguably due to the explosion of applications (both free and fee) available on the AppStore (and as a result I use my iPhone quite heavily), he wanted to pick my brain to see what my favorite applications were and if I could offer an suggestions he might enjoy using.

This morning, the group grabbed a bite of morning breakfast at a local, central Phoenix restaurant before my friend from Los Angeles was required to catch his flight home. During the course of breakfast, and completely unsolicited, another mutual friend turned to me and proclaimed:

“I heard you have a Twitter page?!”

My first reaction was one of disbelief, as this was a person who does not use, and has a difficult task conceptualizing social media. How did he know about Twitter? More importantly, how did he know I was using Twitter? Not that it is a secret or anything, but I typically do not bring up details about my life’s activities to those who would have no interest in hearing about them. I am a reasonably open person with my friends, yet I can always tell when I talk about something they have no interest in, so I won’t discuss a topic for the sake of simply hearing my own voice while their eyes glaze over. Quickly I realized my friend from Los Angeles had a prior conversation with him where it was mentioned my use of Twitter last November during a visit to Los Angeles and to attend the LA Auto Show.

Recently, a friend of mine, Tyler Hurst, blogged about an experience he had with an elderly gentleman regarding Twitter. My experience this morning seemed to echo his quite closely. It made me think… I have only been using Twitter since July 2008. In fact, Twitter was my first foray into the world of social media. The blogsphere, has on occasion, drawn parallels between social media services and an array of illicit substances, and Twitter is compared to hard-core substances such as heroin. Given that simile, it makes perfect sense that now I have opened up to accept other forms of social networking that were at one time verboten in my mind. I am definitely hooked on social media now. However Twitter, despite its meteoric rise in popularity over the past year, remains largely an enigma to many people. I proceeded to describe what Twitter was to my friend over breakfast, but the conversation ended with the concept just as unclear as when the conversation began.

Am I simply unable to clearly articulate what Twitter is? Is the concept just too foreign for some to understand and accept? Or is Twitter simply destined remain the domain of hard-core social media junkies for the next several years?