Mar
13
Twitter is the New Black
Twitter, for those of you that aren’t into the new era of social networking, is a micro-blogging system that asks its users, “What are you doing?” Twitter users constantly post updates of their daily lives in the form of Tweets, which are text updates shorter than 140 characters. You can subscribe to twitter feeds from your friends, companies, or influential people to get instant updates into their worlds.
So now that you know what Twitter is, why should you care? After all, there are tons of other social applications out there that are constantly bombarding our senses with a never-ending stream of data. Facebook keeps tabs on all your “friends” with status updates, pictures, and messaging. Blogs and emails handle the bigger topics and issues from your friends and colleagues. Message boards and forums give you incite into any niche topic in the world, and YouTube steams a constantly expanding world of video blogs, news, and humor.
Twitter claims to fill in the gaps between emails and Facebook updates, to give you a constant stream of thoughts that paint a picture of your friends’ true lives. After all, life is what happens while you’re not sitting in front of your computer. The bigger question is, why do you need to know that your friend is waiting in line at a movie premier or taking a nap at 1pm?
You don’t. But, humans are creatures with an insatiable appetite for information, and Twitter fulfills your basic instinct to want to know everything about everyone around you. Many people try to make the argument that all of this online social networking is leading to the breakdown of real human interaction and meaningful conversations. This knee-jerk type of thinking is actually far from the truth. Social networking and live feeds like Twitter actually bring people together in more intimate ways then ever before. It just takes less effort to stay in touch with someone since you don’t have to be sitting in their living room or talking on the phone to share meaningful ideas. I’m sure some of these same arguments were made when the telephone was first becoming popular.
If you are still unconvinced about Twitter, think about it as an up-to-the-second way to search the world. Many people overlook Twitter’s insanely powerful search tool. Since over 6 million people on this planet are Twittering every day, multiple times per day, Twitter essentially becomes the biggest live, constantly updating stream of thought in the history of this planet. Twitter search makes Google search seem like reading last month’s newspaper. Google crawls pages often, but there is no way to compete with short, to the point Tweets flying at you from 6 million different people. Also, Twitter alerts you when new search results come in after you original search. It doesn’t get more live than that.
Twitter is also gaining traction as a new form of journalism from the front lines. The attacks in Mumbai in November were a great example. A flurry of Tweets from on the ground in Mumbai kept the world up to date on the situation like no news channel could.
Google offered Twitter $500 million to buy the company, but Twitter refused, if that tells you anything about where this is headed.
The dark side of all this Twittering is the underlying fact that 99% of all Tweets do not contain any information of any real importance. It also empowers ordinary people to make false or misleading statements to a broad audience, which can spread like wildfire in a matter of minutes. Rumors have the capability of flying around the world to thousands of people instantly, which can be extremely damaging.
Do I have a Twitter account? No. Will I ever have one? Probably not (I don’t even use Facebook updates). I am a firm believer of edited, thought-out forms of written communication. Blogs, news sources on my phone, and forums I subscribe to are almost to much to keep up with as it is. I don’t even have time to read magazines anymore. But why would I? That information could be a few DAYS old!
Do you Twitter? Is it a passing fad, or just the beginning of hyper-live communication networks? Does your company have a Twitter feed? Should it? I would probably receive responses sooner if I had a Twitter account…
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