Lets Tweet

For my post this week, I decided to look into twitter and what its all about. Twitter is defined to be “a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users' updates (known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter) So basically you can think of it as the status updates on Facebook but delivered to your phone. Or even just a test message that is sent to multiple users. Twitter has approximately 4-5 million users. Its apparently the 3rd most popular social networking site behind Facebook and MySpace. At first, I was not sure why one would want to have such an account. Yes, I agree that status updates are interesting at times but having it sent to my phone would be much. But with some more reading, I learned that this technology can be quite useful.

This technology is used in many different scenarios. For example, during the infamous California wildfires, firefighters would use twitter to send users updates about the fire. Twitter was even more effective in spreading information and updates to students during the Virginia Tech shootings than traditional media. In this scenario specifically, I can see how useful and effective this technology is. I remember watching the updates on TV on that horrific day. I cant even imagine how frustrated family and friends were not knowing how their loved ones were and what we going on. Another area that twitter could offer its support are updates for students at colleges and universities. For example, when there are closings dues to in-climate weather, colleges could just tweet students. I know some college are adopting this, I think more should.

There are other similar services out there such as Jaiku that is offered in other countries and offer additional services such as lifestreaming. Lifestreaming is defined as an online record of a person's daily activities, either via direct video feed or via aggregating the person's online content such as blog posts, social network updates, and online photos. Twitter seems to be losing ground nationally. For instance, in China, the Chinese version has outdone twitter with many enhancements. Twitter seems to be doing well within the US but needs to move quicker and make more enhance to attract international users.