I have been a twitter user for some time now and must admit, it took me a while to understand what it was all about. I think that I have it all under control now and use it fluently. There have been stats around showing that some mad percentage of new Twitter users default and never use the service again.

My thoughts on this are that Facebook is easy to determine what you are to do, sign up find people you know, add them as friends participate in the interactive games etc. Facebook is all about interacting with people that you already know and have made some form of relationship with at another point in time.

This is where Twitter differs, it isn’t completely obvious at first what your supposed to do. It isn’t as easy to find people, and I feel that this is kind-of the point. Now yes it is a great medium for following people that you already know and keeping in touch and communicating but Twitter to me is all about finding new friends, as well as it rapidly becoming almost like a news service. Because of it’s instantaneous nature you can get news from anywhere in the world as it is happening. I also feel that to really make the most of this service you need to have access to it on the go say on your mobile phone because of it’s live and up to the second nature if you don’t then by the time you sit down at your computer of the evening then of course it’s not going to make any sense.

I read a blog post by a guy of the name Dave Moyer you can read it here: http://davemoyer.org/2009/05/23/dont-spout-nothingness-nobody-cares/ and I have to say I think that it’s a pretty accurate summary of the whole situation!

So I guess what I’m saying is, to everybody out there who has signed up for Twitter and then said to me ‘I don’t get it, it’s so lame’, well do you want a service like this, are you willing to participate in the online community that is Twitter and are you willing to give it some time to learn? If not then don’t whine at us about how you don’t get it.