jr conlin's ink stained banana

i think i know what i don't like about Twitter vs. Blogs. Twitter makes you less important.

Hang on, it's a question of context.

Granted, in Twitter, folks can build small messages and post to each other, so, fr'instance i can do things like post messages such as: "@HydrogenGuy Well, only if you turn left and cough."

Now, if you happen to be HydrogenGuy, you'll find my jape about his dream of becoming a chain smoking NASCAR driver uproariously funny. Even though you posted 11 other tweets since then. If you're not HydrogenGuy, you'll think that i'm a pervert for providing him that reply to "Should i let my niece hold my antique Christmas globes?" since that's the last message he posted. Thus making me a victim of Date Jape.

Plus, you have no context since there's no real threads. You can see the "in reply to" but that's about it. Unless you're either myself or HydrogenGuy, you're not part of the conversation.

What makes it even worse is that if you are either myself or HydrogenGuy and someone else posts up "@HydrogenGuy, that just kinda confirms what we talked about, huh?" after my reply, i have no idea if RobotKarateMan is talking about me, the NASCAR/niece mixup, or some interesting new property related to the Mössbauer Effect he discovered while spinning a pie plate at a rock he had stuck in an outlet.

You simply don't know, and since you're not part of that singular conversation, you'll have no idea. Twitter is mono- or at most bi-directional, only. It does a great job of making the personal You (the individual reading this) very important, it makes the larger You (everyone who reads this) far less a factor.

Counter this with blogs, where you've got somewhat temporal posts, but a definite thread based (Even more so once i get around to fixing up this theme so that they show up.) Granted, at the moment, i focus more on the larger You of folks that visit, but it's trivial for me to also focus on the singular You.

Possibly inappropriately so.

i kinda get the idea of Twitter. It's the bathroom stall of the internet. Short scrawls meant for nobody and everyone all at the same time. It also explains why no other company has been able to duplicate twitter. Nobody has as popular a bathroom stall.