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Issue 4 > The five faces of Twitter.

The five faces of Twitter.

Justin Kownacki ponders different ways people use those trendy Tweets.

Having used Twitter for several months now, it's become part of my daily routine, riding shotgun in my sidebar (I use Tweetbar almost exclusively—no SMS for me) and accompanying me throughout my web-connected day.

Unfortunately, not everyone on my Twitter list is following me. That's okay—I'm not following all of my followers either. We're all entitled to be selective to whom we offer up our precious eyeballs, and sometimes a person we don't know very well isn't worth adding to our stream.

What follows is a crib sheet of ways you can use Twitter (for good or evil).

Twitter as confessional. Some people believe everyone in their lives is interested in every remote detail about them—where they're going, where they've been, what they just ate… or will be eating… or wanted to eat but didn't…

For them, Twitter is like an ever-morphing diary, in which they can publish every syllable of their internal monologue for all to see. Fascinating as this may be to the confessor, it's seldom ever as interesting to the confessor's followers, who frequently feel compelled to leave that person's Twitter stream.

And yet… this is the kind of person who's the hardest to delete from your stream. Because you feel like you're actually deleting the person, rather than their endless trickle of self-rationalization.

Then again, perhaps the two are inseparable…

Twitter as open mic night. Is everything in your day a potential punchline? Twitter lets you hone your stand-up comedy skills into top form.

Thanks to their 140-character limit, you're forced to keep it short, sweet and punchy. The altruists in this category simply seek to beam some cynical sunshine into the lives of their fellow Twitterers throughout the day. The cynics use it to erode attention spans ever further, strengthening the snack-based culture and prepping their bits for Thursday nights at the Comedy Shack.

Twitter as megaphone. Some folks have over 1,000 followers on Twitter… while only receiving messages from a few hundred people that they actually know. This 'megaphone' approach insinuates that a person is believed (by the masses) to be someone worth listening to. This person, in turn, has little interest in listening to the masses.

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