Twitter Assignment

I still don't like Twitter. I had a Twitter account and after months of rather dull snippets of people's lives, I canceled my account. This new assignment did not improve my view of Twitter. I was in Olympia this weekend at a series of workshops for teachers which I found very informative. I was not able to elaborate since Twitter only allows 140 characters. All I could do was say I was there and enjoyed it.

I remember a couple of recent studies about Twitter. One study showed that almost half of all tweets were trivial chatter. Now, how they defined trivial, I don't know. But, most of the tweets I remember were just that. Not quite the Twitter joke of "I'm breathing." or "I'm walking, now." but close.

The other study followed the Tweets coming out of Iran during the election protests. Of all of the Tweets reporting from the protests, it turns out that most of the posts were re-post or, re-Tweets. Very few were original.

Let's face it. Twitter is a neat marketing idea. A Tweet is nothing more than a text message. With so few characters, you often need to eliminate vowels and use grammar shortcuts to cram as much information as possible. Since you can post on computers from your phone and to phones from a computer, there is no difference. Tweet just sounds so much better than txt msg.

All social networking and blog sites are, by their very nature, egocentric. They are there to tell other people what we are up to. If we really thought about it, we might wonder if anyone really cared that much. A blog does allow one to write more in depth, whereas Twitter doesn't allow much. You can't write anything in depth so posts tend to be rather shallow.