The Purpose of Twitter
This is in reply to this USA Today article on Twitter that Google found me.
My friend Mathias brought me onto Twitter, a website that epitomizes Facebook’s Status Updates feature, as alerting your Twitter friends of your status is the only function of the site. And like many other sites these days, it permeates onto other devices, namely, our cell phones.
Andrew Kantor, writing for USA Today, disapproves of the service, citing information overload and frivolous updates (”time for lunch…. Hmm what should I have. Ssoooooo many choices”) as his major pains with the service. And he’s got a point.
But Twitter’s also a public bulletin board just for you and your friends, allowing you to do some interesting things, such as “crowd source” for information, where you post a status update asking a question and your contacts can reply. Or you can use it as a social bookmarking service like del.icio.us or digg.com, sharing sites and articles with your friends. It’s an intriguing idea.
Like all communication tools, they limit what we can say and how we can say it, but they also help reshape our thoughts and give us ideas we might not otherwise have had. I can’t imagine crowd sourcing via e-mail or the telephone with any urgency or ease, which are two critical aspects of crowd sourcing.
As more people use Twitter, the ways in which it is used will likely expand, but for now, it is just an interesting sort of toy .. a toy I hope you check out.
Categorized as Life