Caffeinated Coder

A couple of months ago I wrote a post that dismissed micro-blogging as white noise.  I had been only half-heartedly following the twitter page on GeeksWithBlogs and noticed lots of rather dull tweets of the "I’m hungry" and "Just rebooted my computer" variety. I quipped in my post that I might be able to justify Twitter for entertainment’s sake if people posted messages that looked more like this:

* Was attacked by a band of ninjas. I dispatched with them quickly but got ninja blood on my new shirt… about 3 hours ago from jail

* I just took a dump on boss’s Lexus. Suddenly I feel much better about having to work this weekend… about 5 hours ago from whore house

However, nobody seemed inclined to take my advice so I concluded that the medium was probably only suitable as a form of social entertainment for teenagers and was not a worthwhile pursuit for a software developer looking for professional development.

I just didn’t see how value could be provided in 140 characters, especially since the macro-blogging format was already being criticized for promoting superficial knowledge of topics and an even shorter attention span for a profession that is already notorious for ADD.

Well, that was two months ago and now I have a confession to make.

I just checked my Twitter home page and noticed that I have posted over 75 updates (mostly in the last several weeks) and am following over 40 people (mostly other bloggers).

It appears that I have caught the twitter bug.

Why?

1. Sarcastic Quips - I’m not sure if this is a permanent trend or not, but I’ve noticed that the tenor of my blog posts has strayed from my sarcastic roots and they have tended to be more on the serious side lately. I’m not intentionally doing this, but as I put more effort into the content the humor aspects don’t always naturally fit in as well. Luckily Twitter provides a perfect medium to channel all of my sarcastic energies into nice, concise bursts throughout the day. It refreshes me mentally like a good run refreshes me physically.
2. New Writing Challenges - My favorite twitter experiment so far has been Twaiku, which is what I call technology related Haiku that follows the traditional 5-7-5 syllable pattern. I’ll probably do a compilation post along with a call for contributions soon. I also like the challenge of trying to squeeze thoughts into 140 characters. One major twitter anti-pattern that I see is continuing single thoughts or even rants across multiple tweets. To me that is a sign that the writer needs to be more disciplined or else move to a different format like email or regular blogs.
3. Recommendations - I have a whole list of thoughts and impressions about tools that I will probably never turn into blog posts because of the commitment it entails in both writing and research. By contrast, twitter encourages these types of half-formed thoughts. Ad hoc recommendations for tools and resources is one of the more common topics that I see in the twittersphere (right behind potty humor, bizarre links, and TMI confessions) . 
4. Personal Interactions - One of the more unexpected aspects of twittering for me was the refreshing informality among micro-bloggers. The comment section of blogs can be serious and sometimes even adversarial as people debate the merits of various ideas. Although I’ve seen a few episodes of "twisticuffs" (twitter fisticuffs) between Scott Bellware and …well…lots of people, I mostly see tweeters joking around and having friendly exchanges. While I sometimes wish that the technology to personal/trivial ratio was a little higher for some micro-bloggers, it is still refreshing to see a completely different side to otherwise serious bloggers like Jeff Atwood, who recently twittered a link to a photo of a skydiving cat.

I do still have some reservations about Twitter regarding the overall signal-to-noise ratio, but I think this will improve as bloggers gain more experience with the writing format and Twitter clients start providing more sophisticated means for categorizing and filtering information.

For now, I will continue to take advantage of the freakishly slow compile times on my laptop and consume copious amounts of twitter brain candy.

For those of you who are relatively new to Twitter, here are some of my favorite Tweets from the last several days from macro-bloggers that you’ll likely recognize:

* Scott Hanselman "You know you are coding too much when you secretly wish you had a catheter in your backpack." [blog\msg]

* Phil Haack - "My guess for @codinghorror’s and @wilshipley’s new venture…codingwhore.com! porn == $$$" [blog\msg]

* Jimmy Bogard - "New personal reading material: "physics of the impossible"…has not explained how william shatner’s toupee stays attached (yet)" [blog\msg]

* Eric Engtech- I’m at about 500 lines of code without having checked it into source control. It’s kind of like having sex without a condom." [blog\msg]

* Jeff Atwood - "Computers change; people don’t. 72 years and counting. http://tinyurl.com/2npfyd." [blog\msg]

* Scott Bellware - "Microsoft keeps customer expectations artificially deflated so that they never exceed the capabilities of its products" [*blog* *updates*\msg]

* Mike Gunderloy - "I’m going to get my dog a phone. And then start giving HER number to PR people." [blog\msg]

* Rob Conery - "Twitter is conversational DCOM." [blog\msg]

* David Laribee (a.k.a. "the beatnik tweeter") "The Person Under The Stairs." [msg] …or "Omitting myself" [msg] [blog] (yes, a tad surreal at times…)

* Dewayne Christensen: Public service announcement: Make sure you have extra hose before you try to burn off that dead patch of grass in the yard. [still not sharing sarcasm with macro-blogging world\ msg]

* CaffeinatedTwit (that’s me) - "Twitterer Archetype 1: Person who can’t scale using regular IM, so they eliminate the communication bottleneck by going asynchronous." [msg]

* CaffeinatedTwit (that’s me) - "Twitterer Archetype 2: A person who is only a few bad days away from becoming that guy who mumbles to himself all day on a street corner." [msg]

* Scott Koon (a.k.a LazyCoder): response - @CaffeinatedTwit The bottleneck, in some cases, is that one or more of the participants is batcrap insane!" [blog\msg]

See you on Twitter! (assuming you’re batcrap insane enough to follow me after this)

 Subscribe in a reader