Twitter isn’t complicated
The promotional strapline for New Scientist’s review of ‘The Twitter Book’ says: Micro-blogging service Twitter is all the rage, but even experts admit that it is confusing to use - this primer should help the virgins and aficionados alike
Which experts, exactly? Because, well, it really isn’t confusing or complicated. It’s very, very simple.
1. Sign up for an account.
2. Find some interesting people to follow.
3. Periodically, figure out the answer to the question “What are you doing?”, type up the answer in under 140 characters, post.
4. Read other people’s answers to the same question.
5. Repeat until you get bored.
If you find Twitter any more complicated to use than this, you are doing it wrong. You don’t need to hire a social media expert or read a book to understand Twitter. Twitter is very easy to understand: it’s a large number of people answering the question “What are you doing?”
Now, there is plenty of complexity in the world. That’s why sociologists and economists build complex computational models to understand societies and economies. That’s why people spend decades reading Plato, then writing long books explaining their understanding of a complex thinker to each other. It is why if you want to become a scientist in any of the natural sciences, you have to spend years learning and reading enormous, expensive text books.
But Twitter isn’t complicated. Some people have made it complicated with retweets and complex metrics and piping stuff all over the place and automatic bots and followfriday and all this other shit. Fundamentally, Twitter is not complicated. The only people who profit from the “Twitter is complicated” myth are consultants. It’s a lot less complicated than Facebook (and yet millions of people manage to use that without reading a “for dummies”-style book) and also about the same level of complexity of e-mail (and even more people manage to use that).
Malet Street, London, England
