A Look at Twitter
I recently discovered Twitter and quickly developed a fascination with it. If you aren’t familiar with it, Twitter is a web application that lets you post 140 character updates to the web. You can follow other people’s updates and others can follow yours. You can update from the web, from a local application, from a cell phone, email, or IM.
After expanding your circle of followers and followees, it becomes apparent that Twitter is a bit of a close-knit community. It quickly became apparent to me that the people I was following were following each other, and their followers were following me and I was following them etc.
One person described twitter as being “incestuous” referring to the way everyone in this family follows each other. It’s an interesting phenomenon.
What people use Twitter for varies greatly. Some people do just update what they are doing at the moment, while others use it to direct people to their latest blog posts. Many people like posting random thoughts and commenting on the random thoughts of others. It also serves as a nice IM client, sending messages to all your friends and followers who happen to be online.
Twitter is frequently hampered by technical issues and often goes down for short periods of time. As things get ironed out, I can only see more and more people using the service and think it has enormous potential in the workplace (as more than just a time-waster).
-Jeff
February 2, 2008 at 2:32 am
When I first joined Twitter, I searched for a few well known people, added them, and started looking at who else followed them, and who they followed, and quickly built up a group of people to follow. It didn’t take long to gain followers of my own. Since then, however, I basically add people that are recommended by others, and whose names I see come up often. I love getting involved in conversations with all of my Twitterbuds, so many viewpoints I would have never otherwise considered on so many different topics.
February 4, 2008 at 4:19 am
Exactly. Lots of cool people from all over with a wide variety of opinions.