A few good reasons to use Twitter

  1. It’s superficial. Surfaces are beautiful and necessary, especially to us primates with our extreme reliance on vision.
  2. Chaucer Doth Tweet.

  3. Enforced concision has a way of sorting the sheep from the goats where writers and humorists are concerned.
  4. BluegrassPoet.

  5. tinywords.

  6. Tweeting is like back-to-basics blogging: it’s far less about self-promotion than about sharing links and insights.
  7. Teju Cole.

  8. People with mobile phones who can’t otherwise access the web, whether because they’re poor or live in places without wifi, can still enlarge their world.
  9. Bill (of St. Louis)

  10. 80% fewer selfies than Instagram.
  11. KimKierkegaardashian.

  12. Kenneth Goldsmith.

  13. Privacy settings are straight-forward: your tweets are either public or they’re protected. If the latter, no one sees them but those whom you approve.
  14. Maciej Ceglowski.

  15. Deeply serious people still just don’t see the point of it.
  16. Eileen Myles.

  17. Florida Man.

  18. You can be yourself, which is to say, anybody or anything you want — no real name required or even particularly encouraged.
  19. Magda Kapa.

  20. Samuel Pepys.

  21. Hitting the Enter key by mistake doesn’t publish your update.
  22. p tat.

  23. As a corporation, Twitter is more zealous about protecting its users’ data than either Facebook or Google. They also seem to take free speech seriously, while responding to legitimate complaints about hate speech.
  24. God.

  25. Somewhat less unwanted crap (“promoted tweets”) in one’s feed than with Facebook.
  26. George Szirtes.

  27. Hilariously absurd pronouncements by self-appointed social media experts on how to use Twitter.
  28. Sparrow.

  29. Wittiness is rewarded. Self-importance is mocked.
  30. 3rdhouse.

  31. Ryokan.

  32. I can embed a bunch of tweets in a blog post and call it a day.

Of course, you can also follow Via Negativa on Twitter. And me. And Luisa.

And yes, I could write a companion post on reasons not to use Twitter. But that would be too easy.

6 Replies to “A few good reasons to use Twitter”

  1. How do you feel about the forced images in the Twitter feed?

    I don’t see ’em on my mobile device, which is good. But do on my laptop, which is a drag.

    1. Yeah, I’ve had that same thought. It will be interesting if they eventually add the option to write longer posts, and 140 characters becomes simply an excerpt from an expandable post. At that point it will be very much like a blog aggregator.

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