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| Devangshu Datta: Tweeting out blankness |
| Devangshu Datta / New Delhi Apr 25, 2009, 00:03 IST |
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A few nights ago, Doginder found a creative way to wake up the neighbourhood. Like all street mutts, he fancies himself as a watchdog and enthusiastically assists his nominal owner, the apartment’s durwan. He usually stops at barking his head off.
That night, however, Doginder climbed on the hood of a car, set off the alarm and then skilfully syncopated his barking to fill in the brief quiet moments in-between the siren’s whoops. He repeated this process with a second car before the durwan persuaded him to cease and desist.
Thoroughly awake by then, I tweeted about it. Next morning, I discovered my twitter account had acquired half-a-dozen new followers. They were all doglovers drawn by this little post about an unremarkable and uncivilised canine.
Some days later, my neighbours underwent a domestic crisis. Their four-year-old twins locked themselves in the loo and refused to go to school. The mother was reduced to alternatively threatening human sacrifice and offering chocolates. In the absence of other entertainment at 7.30 am, I tweeted about this. This time around, I picked up a dozen followers, all of them doting parents of twins.
Twitter (twitter.com) exercises a near-hypnotic fascination. It offers new ways to pass blank moments and indirectly contributes to hygiene. When unoccupied, instead of scratching your nose or digging idly for dirt under fingernails, you have the option of answering the question “What are you doing?” within a 140-character limit.
The question is banal. The technology is cool. Two geeks, Biz Stone and Evan Williams, got tired of being constantly asked this by their friends. They designed a device-agnostic service to answer this. Twitter works on mobile phone, or PC. Users can share urls (auto-compressed) and hence, video and pictures. They can tweet about anything, so long as they stay within the 140-limit.
Any twitter-user (it’s free) can seek out people to follow. Hence the cyber redefinition of a twit as “an idiot who follows a bunch of twits while being in turn followed by another bunch of twits”. So twitter is both a micro-blogging tool as well as a basic social network.
Around for over two years, it’s only hit critical mass recently and it’s growing exponentially. Celebs are hooked. Larry King and Mr Demi Moore had a recent bet about hitting the million-follower mark first. Oprah Winfrey received ID no. 29,546945 on April 16 (every user-name like “OprahWinfrey” is associated with a sequential ID). By April 22, ID 33,500,000 was taken.
Twitter has an easily accessed API (application programming interface). Users have developed third-party tools and applications. The social scientists and market researchers have started dissecting it.
Tweetmeme.com offers the most popular urls traded. The custom search function reveals popular searches as well as allowing search. Twinkle (http://tapulous.com/twinkle/) aggregates posts by region. This last has serious utility when train services break down or forest fires start, as the Queensland Forest Services recently discovered.
Twitter was used by a small group of Indians during 26-11 and its being used by a larger bunch during IPL. But quite apart from breaking news updates and potential utility in emergencies, twitter is simply great fun.
Tweet poems can be quite good and the 140-limit is challenging. You can also let your imagination run free. I have tweeted randomly about seeking the best little bordello in South Extension and examining (non-existent) corpses under flyovers. Some people describe meals (dal, roti, mooli in Doginder’s case).
None of this is intrinsically fascinating. But somewhere out on the worldwide web or in mobile cyberspace, somebody is searching for 140-posts about bordellos, South Ex, corpses, flyovers, pork tenderloin and horse-radish. Tweet and they shall follow.
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