Can someone explain twitter to me? I just don’t get it.
How is it different then sending a bulk email to all your friends and family?
How is it different than simply reading a “live” FR thread?
Thanks in advance.
You’d have to ask my kids that. I’m not up to speed yet.
Jeff Head may be able to answer your question.
Think of it as IM on steroids.
i finally signed up on it the other night. thought it looked lame. then i started finding people to ‘follow’. some were in Iran, others here (like Jeff Head), you can sign up for FR, CNN, most news sites, and then there are people like Karl Rove. you just ‘follow’ them and when they send a message it comes to your home page. i just keep it open all day now and check it off and on to see what is going on all over the place! lol hope that helps a little? it was interesting the last few days/nights reading the tweets out of Iran by the way.
Twitter is a free "micro-blogging" service that let's you post short 140 character "tweets" including a message or link. Your tweets are visible to people who have chosen to follow your posts and are generally also searchable by anyone. You can reply to a tweet by writing @Username. It's similar to Facebook status updates except more public. In fact I set up my own tweets to cross-post to Facebook. You are correct that it's basically the same thing people have always done, just very streamlined and trackable. Of couse the simplicity/ease of posting from your cell phone means people can do it practically any time, anywhere. The searchability makes it easy to graph trends and see how a particular event is unfolding in real time. For instance you can find other people who are standing in line for the same movie across the world or hiding under a desk in Tehran. Twitter has really caught on in the media/pr world or basically anybody who has a message they want to get out.
Also people who want to make it easier to group tweets together will include a “hash tag” in their tweet such as #iranelection. For instance we could start making tweets ending with #FRtweets and move this whole thread to Twitter. Lots of people use it to post inane stuff like “just ate some French fries but it really shines when it comes getting first hand info and feedback on breaking events.
It also uses the internet for wide area (spelled world-wide) coverage.
It is like an organized, world-wide chat room, where you can direct messages privately to individual members, to discussion topics specifically (where they can only be seen by those searching on those specific topics) or to the open air where, according to how you set up your account, anyone can see it.
It also allows these text messages to be sent back and forth to those same criteria, using your cell phone texting capability.
Very wide open, very wide ranging, very innovative...and extremely timely for this uprising in Iran. A literal God send for them actually because it has let them get the word out and continues to do so. Iran will have to drop the whole cellular network and internet to stop it.
I don’t get it either.
The difference between Twitter and a fax machine is, a fax machine does something useful.