Status Consciousness

This morning's column, like an increasing number of my Thursday pieces, started out as a blog post.

I thought I'd write a short bit about the art of writing a clever Facebook status update. I'd seen this form of concise creativity take off on that site (especially after this Palo Alto, Calif.-based social network stopped requiring status updates to begin with the deadening verb "is"). I'd been both amused by my friends' wordplay (how much time does Amy Argetsinger put into finding song lyrics to quote?) and challenged to come up with my own.

Then I realized how a sort of collective conversation could emerge out of these little snippets of text after The Post won six Pulitzer Prizes this spring. One after another, co-workers changed their status messages to some variation of "I'm proud to work at the Washington Post." (My next update: "Rob loved reading his fellow Postal workers' ecstatic status updates.")

Not long after, I finally decided to make some serious use of the Twitter account I'd opened last summer. And once I latched onto the (possibly insane) concept of writing a column in Twitter-compatible 140-character paragraphs... I had no choice but to go ahead with the idea.

So there you are.

In case you're curious about the Twitter users I noted in the column, here they are:

* The marriage proposal
* The affirmative response
* The briefly-imprisoned Twitterer
* "Darth Vader"
* "Metro"
* JetBlue
* Barack Obama
* Hillary Clinton
* And then there's me

(It is not true that I wrote this entire post just to drum up more followers for my Twitter feed; if you do choose to follow me, I just hope you're not too bored!)

Do you post status updates anywhere online? How often do you write new ones?

Let's talk about this during my Web chat today, starting at 2 p.m. If you forget to add that to your schedule, don't worry--I'll post a reminder about it on Twitter.

By Rob Pegoraro | May 1, 2008; 9:36 AM ET | Category: Digital culture
Previous: Paring Your Plug-Ins | Next: Returning To Sender: A Cable Conundrum

Comments

Please email us to report offensive comments.

I do Facebook, and that's it. I've never done a status update -- my profile is actually fairly bare. I suppose I'd feel a little narcissistic about doing it. I might if I had some big news, but that's only maybe. I used to be able to say I was rarely on Facebook, but then Scrabulous entered my life!

Is Twitter just a series of status updates? Where's the networking in that?

Guess I'd have to join to see...

Posted by: cbr | May 1, 2008 9:58 AM

I just wanted to say...very bold choice linking to your Twitter page in your blog post! What's a flack? Do readers actually call you?! And how odd to know what you do in your days off...see, technology makes us all creepy, even when we don't mean to be!

Posted by: cbr (again) | May 1, 2008 10:03 AM

We have a company based in Northern Va. building a conversational search engine (Summize). One of our products is a twitter search engine. It allows you to see what people in the twitter world are talking about now. For example you can see what people are saying now about Obama: http://summize.com/search?q=Obama

This might give people a better view of how twitter works.

Posted by: Abdur | May 1, 2008 10:47 AM

the (possibly insane) concept of writing a column

Replace "insane" with "inane" and "possibly" with "very".

;)

Posted by: wiredog | May 1, 2008 11:10 AM

I enjoy putting silly Facebook statuses up, because I generally don't want to tell people what I'm really up to. (So Twitter does not appeal to me at all.) But sometimes I can't think of anything, and it feels like a burden to come up with something new. I don't update very often, anyway.

Posted by: Tony | May 1, 2008 2:37 PM

Chris Hoff found some interesting responses to his twitters from Southwest Airlines. A very interesting corporation paying attention to your Twitters... http://rationalsecurity.typepad.com/blog/2008/04/off-topic-south.html

Posted by: David | May 1, 2008 3:15 PM

Status Consciousness

Comments

Post a Comment