Twitter is an interesting beast. Heck, it took several false starts before I started using it, and I’m still not to sure of it’s overall value, other than an easy way for me to update my status that gets aggregated. I still maintain that it’s a pretty silly concept – it’s nothing more than finger, except that my .plan is in the sky and it aggregates all the people that I follow.
On the other hand, Twitter is somewhat disruptive:
1. It’s completely killed my usage of Facebook, which has now turned into a conduit in which I push Twitter updates to. I rarely visit the site anymore, except to check the occasional mail there. Most of the status updates from my connections start with “is twittering” anyways.
2. Companies are starting to use Twitter to track what people are saying about them.
3. Getting ‘real time news’ is faster out of Twitter. Last night, the quickest way to get the details of Google’s AppEngine announcements was by checking Tweetscan. This was hours before the search engine crawlers hit it and way before people were blogging about it.
4. Lots of applications / mashups are being built to better understand the traffic Twitter is generating and extend the service.
And the downside? The signal to noise ratio on Twitter is massive. It’s worse than with blogs.
While I find that I prefer a client application like Twitterific to the web interface (see here for other tools), it does enable you to easily post every random thought. And boy, people sure do have diarrhea of the mouth when given an open mic to talk with all day long.
Another thing that I don’t understand is how people can follow the stream of consciousness of massive numbers. Really – how can you follow 39,000+ people? Or is it just another “a-list” popularity contest to see who can amass the largest number of “friends”? Who knows.
Anyways, the jury is still out on how useful Twitter really is .. Time will tell, I guess.
Oh, and finally, my twitter status updates are here if you’re interested in reading what coffee I’m drinking this morning.
(source:furrygoat.com)
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