For me, what is Twitter for?

I do understand the appeal of watching, and being woven into, a fabric of many people's daily minutiae. There's comfort there, above and beyond the various usefulnesses of connecting with other people. There's a feeling of fitting into place, being significant yet insignificant (another puppy in the pile), making sense even to near-strangers. But for me, I think, twitter's benefits will come from making myself get very specific.

For example, a while ago I did a month-long experiment with a subject-specific twitter account, and I found the primary benefit for me was the increased feeling of accountability. If you're reporting what you're doing in a way that's sustained and 'public' to any degree at all, you do feel moved to have things to report. I know I engaged more with that account's subject matter than I would've otherwise, which was beneficial all around. This suggests it might be useful, in a life that's still so full of administrivia and the business of supporting myself, to have a composing twitter where I only report on the moments when I've made time for actually composing. "Working on Gather These Mirrors." "Working on Shahida." Entries like that wouldn't have any broad appeal, but number of followers isn't important -- just publicness-to-any-extent. Could I make myself make at least one entry like that every day?

In the same vein, my new experiment is a twitter account just for "what's wonderful" -- another area where I'm interested in accountability, in making myself both focus on and articulate/preserve something specific. There's so much random beauty and so many small joyful thoughts in any given day, but these things get displaced by logistics and responsibilities and unpleasant surprises and all the enervating mechanics of living in an expensive, competitive, overcrowded city.

So this new account is strictly for recording some of the random joys that flash into my head -- just taking a minute to fix each of them in a form that says, "This is important too." This gorgeous pattern the sun's making on the wall; this mind-opening image I just saw in somebody's blog; this rush of happiness at the IM thread; this out-loud laugh at the terrible pun. "Delight is important too." Not frivolous, not a waste -- not distraction but core.

A Farewell to CrackBerries, and a hello to (!) AOL

So I'm past my contractual obligation with T-Mobile and it's time to let the BlackBerry service go -- even though BB service was my perfect solution for super-cheap data access all over northern Serbia and Sweden (and even though "Woo, I have five bars of unlimited EDGE in small-town Serbia, exactly like I have in NYC, for $1.50 a day" gave me the same global-village thrill I'd gotten during the 2006 elections with "Woo, I'm making all my MoveOn.org calls for free with SkypeOut from my rented room in Vienna, exactly like I would in NYC").

There will be better options for next summer's Serbia/Eurotrails (perhaps some hacktastic -- or even Apple-sanctioned, by that point -- VOIP on an iPod Touch). And my BB has never worked consistently for laptop tethering, which was my other main intent for it (for that, I'm still using my seven-year-old Sprint phone, which is slow but rock-solid as a cell modem, and which is at least grandfathered into $10/mo unlimited data :)).

I did find BB service mildly addictive (which for me is saying a LOT, since I have one of the least addictive personalities of anybody I know).

But the only important element of BB service for me to replace was sms. I tried a few web-to-sms services that had beautifully implemented websites but were, in terms of the actual sms delivery, either not ready for prime time or ad-supported. I've finally settled on the free, two-way IM-to-sms feature in AIM. After years of helping various friends try to use AOL's main email client, I'd developed an instinct that AOL products weren't that usable either... but it's good to get over that instinct. AIM-to-sms is reliable and stable and ad-free, and I'm really grateful it exists!

And I do still have warm fuzzy feelings about AOL as a company, given that they paid me $6K for about 300 hours of the most pleasant work I've ever done for money (back in those heady pre-dotcom-crash days when they were still throwing cash at their fledgling Digital City network and I was "principal classical music writer" for New York, which mostly involved writing concert/event previews and was the holy grail of a telecommuting job where I never even met my boss in person, much less set foot in an office).

I do need to record -- for use in AIM, or just for posterity -- the new-sms alert sound I've been using on my BlackBerry, which became such an amazing Pavlovian trigger for fast heartbeats and delight and horniness during those first few months of my relationship with B. (speaking of heady early days :)).