Twitter as a Useful Tool for Normal People

Some­how, the addi­tion of a cou­ple of very main­stream media sources of a Twit­ter feed (for a newbie’s descrip­tion of Twit­ter, read Newbie’s Guide to Twit­ter). For example:

http://twitter.com/nprnews

… has made me re-question whether I should re-consider its use. Yes: It has lots of applications.

The rea­son I stopped using it, was because the inces­sant “instant mes­sage” deliv­ery medium I was using, the par­tic­u­lar Twit­ter client, was not help­ful to my “ADD” nature. What Twit­ter needs is an easy-install client that is:

1. Very easy to install. Some­thing I can send my web new­bie clients to and they can just press a but­ton, and it’s done.
2. Easy to get updates with­out try­ing. Sort of like email. Not like a forum, where you have to be a ded­i­cated fol­lower to remem­ber to par­tic­i­pate. But also, not like an instant mes­sage pro­gram, because again–ironically, on the other side of the attention-grabbing scale–this is good for ded­i­cated fol­low­ers, but not for the casual observer.

On the scale between low-push to high-push modes of online com­mu­ni­ca­tion, we need to be able to decide eas­ily just exactly how much push is too much, or not enough. In fact, we should have a scale, a slider, where we can decide exactly this.

Fur­ther­more, I do not want another “client” I have to mon­i­tor. I turned off Skype for this rea­son. Too many darn apps run­ning at the same time. Instead, make a work­ing Fire­fox addon, for exam­ple, that bugs me just enough to remem­ber it’s there, but not so much that I want to turn it off!

I am still try­ing to find this AddOn, because the ones I checked out were really not ade­quate for a vari­ety of reasons.

At any rate, the geeks are really going to have to start think­ing like new­bies around here! Oth­er­wise, it will make the adop­tion to the masses dif­fi­cult. To put it another way, I think the first entre­pre­neur to get it right is going to do quite well.