Twitter As Your Blog, Twitter As Your Newsfeed, Twitter This, And Twitter That
Probably one of the coolest things to hit the web in recent years is the sensationally huge network — Twitter. Everyone from little old ladies to full fledged pop artists [aka Britney Spears] give up their status via Twitter. From the President of the United States to Israeli Defense Forces pounding Gaza — all are Tweet’ing like mad.
First on the scene in spring 2006 via a small side project out of San Francisco, Twitter brought simple yet effective real-time communications to the web in the form of shouts (also affectionately known as Tweets). From this small side project [as Twitter puts it] developed a full fledged real-time short messaging service that interfaces globally across a mix of networks and devices.
Twitter as your blog-
No desire to be a concise 1000 word-per-post blogger, but still want to get the word out? Consider blogging through Twitter. One catch — each entry is a skimpy 140 characters [including spaces]. But regardless of keystroke shortage, just set your Tweets to hit the Public Timeline and now you’re ‘blogging’ out over a million users on Twitter alone. Throw in some APIs and now you’re connecting to millions more outside Twitter.
Twitter as your Newsfeed-
With major news organizations like CNN and BBC Tweeting away on breaking news events, you have no shortage of real-time newsfeeds. Even somewhat more obscure [nonetheless highly relevant] newsfeeds like BNOnews become can’t-live-without Tweets. And of course, not to leave behind the Tweets from people you choose to ‘Follow.’
Information overload? Not according to the folks behind Twitter. They translate overload into this eloquent depiction:
“Twitter solves information overload by changing expectations traditionally associated with online communication. At Twitter, we ask one question, “What are you doing?” The answers to this question are for the most part rhetorical. In other words, users do not expect a response when they send a message to Twitter. On the receiving end, Twitter is ambient–updates from your friends and relatives float to your phone, IM, or web site and you are only expected to pay as much or as little attention to them as you see fit.”
To Tweet or not to Tweet.
People are talking a lot these days about "the cloud" and what does that term mean. Software as a Service (virtual applications), Hardware as a Service (buying/renting compute time on machines you don't have to administer), both of which are being done by Amazon, are typically what gave birth to the term "cloud computing," but really Twitter embodies a whole separate meaning here.
Twitter is the Cloud realized for the masses. In a sense, I get my news from Twitter — since it has my eyeballs, and folks I follow post links to news stories, I tend to read a lot of current events posted there. So what is the effect of this? Events of similarly-minded people tend to bubble through to me, and the Cloud acts as a kind of pre-made filter for what I'm interested in. And I did not have to configure it, unlike RSS. It is auto-configured by the simple nature of whom I choose to follow.
It goes both further and closer than that.
Further: I follow Shaq. Yes, that's right, Shaquille O'Neal, the Big Aristotle, is tweeting. (and the legitimacy has already been proven, in case you're skeptical) He's hiLARious, and even though I don't know him, it is interesting to see what he's up to (did you know he gave millions of pounds of peanut butter to hungry folks in Africa?).
Closer: Today I was sitting in a meeting being broadcast worldwide to my company's IT org. About a dozen of us were using twitter to talk about what our CIO was saying — it was great fun and some good ideas came out of it.
Further: Election coverage. Twitter and current.com. 'nuff said.
You get the idea.
Twitter changes everything.
I never expected that I'll be hooked with twitter when it first came out. I know that I like to blog most of the time and just like what you said, if I don't have a 1000 word per post and there's nothing really much to say.. I use Twitter. I just really need to fix my site now to add the twitter plugin
You can't beat Twitter for current events — like getting the message
out in your IT meeting -or- taking in the latest shelling in Gaza.
Twitter is good stuff.
I'm setting up a story on layoffs and used Twitter to search people
tweeting real-time on their employment status. Some scary tweets out
there….
Fast forward 5 years… I'm wearing a small necklace or braclet or even watch that conducts sound through my bones to my brain. If the device is turned on, all my voice tweets – what I like to call veets – are delivered in full living sound as soon as they are sent. So, as I sit typing on my blog using my virtual keyboard at starbucks, I hear the folowing, "Cindy veets, new fashion update: ihearts.com." I double-click the device to activate TTS (Transfer To Screen) and follow the link to ihearts.com to check out Cindy's idea. Thumbs up or thumbs down for voice tweets in the future?
Awesome!! Sign me up for human trials.
That's one of the reasons I use Twitter – to express myself quickly when I am not in the mood of explaining myself in detail. In addition, Twitter is great just for being able to say simple things like, "omfg, can you believe that hit Ray Lewis just put on ole boy?" Things like that.
There is already a site which does video tweets – I believe one of the points of Seesmic is just that.
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I was amazed at the quality of twitter
Twitter's real-time search is one of my favorite features.
twitter really rocks!
I really loved twitter also than Facebook.
Twitter is a micro-blog and it has very limited number of characters which will not be a good thing for most writers/bloggers.