www.time.com/...0,8599,1902604-1,00.html - Cached - Annotated View
This link has been bookmarked by 48 people . It was first bookmarked on 04 Jun 2009, by Johannes Baeck.
"The one thing you can say for certain about Twitter is that it makes a terrible first impression."
The one thing you can say for certain about Twitter is that it makes a terrible first impression. You hear about this new service that lets you send 140-character updates to your "followers," and you think, Why does the world need this, exactly? It's not as if we were all sitting around four years ago scratching our heads and saying, "If only there were a technology that would allow me to send a message to my 50 friends, alerting them in real time about my choice of breakfast cereal."
Related
Audio
Host Katherine Lanpher talks with TIME's Just Fox on stocks vs. bonds and Barbara Kiviat about the housing market's new movement
Download | Subscribe
Specials
The World of Twitter
Specials
Top 10 Celebrity Twitter Feeds
Specials
10 Ways Twitter Will Change American Business
Stories
*
The TIME 100: The Twitter Guys by Ashton Kutcher
More Related
*
How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live
*
Making Mischief on Twitter
*
The TIME 100: The Twitter Guys by Ashton Kutcher
I, too, was skeptical at first. I had met Evan Williams, Twitter's co-creator, a couple of times in the dotcom '90s when he was launching Blogger.com. Back then, what people worried about was the threat that blogging posed to our attention span, with telegraphic, two-paragraph blog posts replacing long-format articles and books. With Twitter, Williams was launching a communications platform that limited you to a couple of sentences at most. What was next? Software that let you send a single punctuation mark to describe your mood? (See the top 10 ways Twitter will change American business.)
And yet as millions of devotees have discovered, Twitter turns out to have unsuspected depth. In part this is because hearing about what your friends had for breakfast is actually more interesting than it sounds. The technology writer Clive Thompson calls this "ambient awareness": by following these quick, abbreviated status reports from members of your extended social network, you get a strangely satisfying glimpse of their da
1. the follower structure,
2. link-sharing,
3. real-time searching
time change socialnetworking socialmedia microblogging trends timemagazine web2.0 article technology twitter social trend education
Injecting Twitter into that conversation fundamentally changed the rules of engagement. It added a second layer of discussion and brought a wider audience into what would have been a private exchange. And it gave the event an afterlife on the Web. Yes, it was built entirely out of 140-character messages, but the sum total of those tweets added up to something truly substantive, like a suspension bridge made of pebbles.
For those Twitter naysayers, some different ways to see the benefit of Twitter.
Couros recommend, Time article on Twitter and how its changing us
Once just a fad, Twitter is developing into a powerful form of communication. What its growth says about us — and the future of American innovation
Article from TIME explaining the impact that Twitter will have on us all.
web2.0 socialmedia twitter microblogging time trends socialnetworking analysis
Scott Fritz on 2009-06-05
If all the tweets are still around in 2000 years anthropologist will have a unique and strange look in to how we lived our daily lives. Also these little updates can help us know our friends a little better. This week one of my coworkers tweeted about getting a different brew of coffee at Starbucks. I was unaware that part of her morning routine was picking up coffee at Starbucks.
Public Stiky Notes
Would you like to comment?
Join Diigo for a free account, or sign in if you are already a member.