Some Musings About Twitter

If you have made your way through the user enrolment dialogue and tested your Twitter account home URL http://www.twitter.com/home you might well find yourself rather appalled: The standard template is a gaudy affront having the capability to severely hurt any reasonable sense of beauty. And, the main input field is titled:

"What are you doing?"

where Twitter.com offers additional context by stating:

"Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?"

Hell, why on earth should I find myself prepared to share publicly on the Internet extremely private statements of what I am doing right now? And, if I use this tool within any professional context, should I be as mad as to twitter that I am in a desperate mood because of I am trying to wrench some useful submission from my computer keyboard to defend my Client, company XYZ, the matter of whom is, unfortunately, entirely pointless in reality? Of course, not. Hence, Twitter must be a fad.

Along these lines I was inclined to think until a week or so ago.

Then, in an Internet discussion forum, I stumbled over some posting where another blogger in the field of law raised the question as to whether or not it might be useful to utilise Twitter for announcing new blog posts.

Hm. This blog provides RSS and Atom feeds, and that should be enough for any Internet-savvy law geek. However, from time to time I receive enquiries to enter an e-mail address to a mailing list with my blog posts. No, sorry, there is no such mailing list. I've simply not bothered myself with creating such a second outlet for my blog posts. Perhaps it might really make sense to announce new blog posts on Twitter in order to have some kind of "broadcast" announcement mechanism for those who don't like RSS / Atom feeds.

All this made me think twice. Perhaps many or even all of common privacy concerns in conjunction with social networking websites are overblown - provided you take them under the right perspective. Maybe some point of view like Theatrum Mundi - the world taken as a stage - must be the parole of the day. And, on the Internet, social network websites, besides blogs, form the most prominent stages of the theatre. However, on that stage you must stick to your role under all circumstances. Perhaps the Twitter mission statement quoted above simply needs some re-adjustment or creative interpretation.

So, why not attempting to utilise Twitter to deliver a proper performance on that stage? That surely does not mean to act as a liar when twittering. But playing a certain role might be helpful which acts as a filter to determine which particulars are fit for being twittered and which are not.

Fortunately I eventually found out that the template of my Twitter page can be modified at will. After some tinkering I understood that I would have to "follow" someone in order to get a timeline of Tweets. I am unable to reconstruct my first steps but somehow I ended up to find out that no less than Mr Jeremy Phillips, the prominent multi-blogger best known from the famous IPkat blog, also was about to start with Twitter. If even Jeremy can be found on Twitter I can't be entirely wrong in trying the same, I thought.

Today I am "following" a total of 24 other Twitter users, i.e. I am subscribed to the chain of twitters of those people which appear in my timeline. Many of these two dozens are co-bloggers in the field of IP law, including, besides Jeremy mentioned earlier (in no particular order):

• Mr Dennis Crouch (PatentlyO)
• Ms Jackie Hutter (IPStrategist)
• Mr Duncan Bucknell (IP Think Tank)
• Ms Jane Lambert (nipclaw)
• Ms Barbara Cookson (filemot)
• Mr Frédéric Glaize (Le petit Musée des Marques)
• Mr Douglas Sorocco (phosita)
• Ms Birgit Clark (Class46)
• Mr Dennis Kennedy (DennisKennnedy.Blog)
• Mr Brett Trout (blawgit)

A little but pleasant surprise was for me that I stumbled over a Twitter account of Mr Julian Crump, Patent Attorney and Secretary General of FICPI. My personal bias towards FICPI was that amongst the activists thereof there are higher-than-average people who still prefer a ballpen on paper over a computer keyboard, and I am glad to see this prejudice destructed.

The characteristics of the social interaction varies from website to website. Someone has coined the sentence:

“If LinkedIn is the office, & Facebook is the bar, & Twitter is the Cocktail/Happy Hour, then MySpace must be High School.”

and there might be more than merely a grain of truth in it (I must disclaim insofar I do not have first-hand experience with Facebook - which I still dislike - and MySpace). However, following my personal timeline of tweets for a week or so I was able to harvest a number of hints and relevant URLs that I would have missed otherwise. And, it is entertaining even with some addictive potency.

Ah, and - by the way - my Twitter URL is

http://twitter.com/axelhorns.