Twitter – and social networks
I have heard of Twitter but not tried it, (emails and face-book are addictive enough and can easily take more time than intended), but an article in Time* made me realise that I need to keep up with developments of this hugely popular social network.
It is a simple idea – messages of no more than 140 characters sent by mobile device or computer. Most messages are trivial – but, like good bloggers, good tweeters soon gather a lot of followers. So twitter can be used to broadcast messages, influence people and I think it is going to cause a huge difference to communication.
According to Steven Johnson (the author) it provides the contact of social networks, live searching and link-sharing, and there are ways of by-passing the 140 character limit. Twitter is growing incredibly quickly with an increase of 1298% visitors between April 2008 and April 2009.
By comparison, Google showed a 9% growth during the same period.
I still do not feel any need to become a tweeter or a follower – but I definitely intend to keep abreast of developments using the twitter platform.
*TIME, June 15, 2009, 28-33