Tech | June 07, 2009 | 14 comments

How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live

source: http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1902604,00.html

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The one thing you can say for certain about Twitter is that it makes a terrible first impression. You hear about this new service that lets you send 140-character updates to your "followers," and you think, Why does the world need this, exactly? It's not as if we were all sitting around four years ago scratching our heads and saying, "If only there were a technology that would allow me to send a message to my 50 friends, alerting them in real time about my choice of breakfast cereal.I, too, was skeptical at first. I had met Evan Williams, Twitter's co-creator, a couple of times in the dotcom '90s when he was launching Blogger.com. Back then, what people worried about was the threat that blogging posed to our attention span, with telegraphic, two-paragraph blog posts replacing long-format articles and books. With Twitter, Williams was launching a communications platform that limited you to a couple of sentences at most. What was next? Software that let you send a single punctuation mark to describe your mood?
And yet as millions of devotees have discovered, Twitter turns out to have unsuspected depth. In part this is because hearing about what your friends had for breakfast is actually more interesting than it sounds. The technology writer Clive Thompson calls this "ambient awareness": by following these quick, abbreviated status reports from members of your extended social network, you get a strangely satisfying glimpse of their daily routines. We don't think it at all moronic to start a phone call with a friend by asking how her day is going. Twitter gives you the same information without your even having to ask.

The social warmth of all those stray details shouldn't be taken lightly. But I think there is something even more profound in what has happened to Twitter over the past two years, something that says more about the culture that has embraced and expanded Twitter at such extraordinary speed. Yes, the breakfast-status updates turned out to be more interesting than we thought. But the key development with Twitter is how we've jury-rigged the system to do things that its creators never dreamed of.

In short, the most fascinating thing about Twitter is not what it's doing to us. It's what we're doing to it.
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14 comments // How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live

  • MissAmanda
  • Denica_Cassandra
  • krush_productions
  • TonesTestament
    • 0
      TonesTestament  

    • I doubt twitter can change anything... it's just a trend it will be here and the next thing you know something else will replace it... and I, myself have a twitter but really never went on it but my facebook man addicting because of an app called restaurant city!

      oh yeah supernew should add a new roommate to social network sketches called twitter...

    • 2 years ago
  • Ricky84
    • 0
      Ricky84  
    • Image

    • Twitter is the pet rock of social networking sites in that most of the hype is generated by media coverage of the phenomenon. It's a quirk. Most people do not use twitter to "follow" their favorite bands just like most people do not use a ROCK to satisfy their need for companionship.

      What's really funny is how ridiculously limited twitter is at delivering information. It's a live stream of posts 140 characters or less. Useful in its own right I admit but completely incapable of competing with the reliablity and ease of use of say, email, text messaging, blogs, MIRC and other chat based applications.

      So the to use another analogy twitter is like a beeper. It makes sense with technology as it is but as soon as we advance to the point where everyone has access to the internet (like we all hae access to a cellphone) it's just going to die out.

      Take MIRC for instance; with that program I can chat, IM, send and receive files of unlimited size, listen to music, stream music to friends, surf the web, watch movies, stream movies to friends, check the weather, run complex calculations, check complex calculations, translate text from any language into english, operate a webcam, and so on and so on and so on. Basically there is an app (or script) for everything you could ever do on a compyuter for MIRC already.

      Twitter on the other hand can stream posts 140 characters long at a time. In truth Twiter was DOA so we can we please stop talking about it already?

    • 2 years ago
  • haterstotheleft
    • 0
      haterstotheleft  

    • I found that the only reason I kept mine for so long was because there were a few indie artists that would actually take the time to respond every once in a while. I enjoyed that than watching my 40 other irl/internet friends saying "i really have to pee" or "omg." And often (I'm guilty of this as well) people would use it like it was a chatting app, so I'd get spammed by my friends' entire conversations. I'm so glad I deleted it.

    • 2 years ago
  • chinnn
    • 0
      chinnn  

    • I'm just not really into twitter. Honestly I dont think anyone cares about what I had for breakfast, nor do I care what they had. It seems pretty pointless to have twitter unless you're always doing something interesting that people would want to know about. I'm just a college student not a celebrity.

    • 2 years ago
  • twitterbot
  • projectionistalex
    • 0
      projectionistalex  

    • Here is my issue with all this twitter stuff. Similar to grizzlyvibes I just don't honestly understand what all the fuss is about. I have a some friends that are more online connected then others, and a few that don't social network at all. Maybe its due to being right in the middle of internet connection to people. I feel the desire to get into it because others think so highly of the service, and sure a part of me wants to be "cool" with it. However it just seems like a half assed attempt to keep track of friends. I'm not one to keep a high amount of facebook friends and prefer more personal contact. Yet at the same time my social circle is rather small, and maybe that is the problem. Or the fact that I've never thought my life is all that interesting for people to keep track of.

      I guess it really depends on how you and your friends social contact is in general. If all your friends are on the service, one might be more likely to use it. From person experience I think tumblr is a much better form of status updates and gives the user a little more freedom. Or maybe I'm just not that cool.

    • 2 years ago
  • twitterbot
  • GrizzlyVibbes
    • 0
      GrizzlyVibbes  

    • twitter is a tool so people can feel important, and the sad part is people are indulging them.

      I feel abosluetly no need to let anyone know my breakfast choice. I dont know maybe im to old for it? im 23 and i use social networking sites. I have friends across the country and great for keeping up. But honeslty. who uses this? is it just teeny bopers? ive only twittered a couple times....and didnt feel a need to ever do so again.

      I prefer old fashioned communication, via phone. the world is getting more connected, but less personal.

    • 2 years ago
  • Highr0ller
  • shocksopping
    • 0
      shocksopping  
    • GrizzlyVibbes:

      I see this argument against Twitter quite a bit. I was a skeptic for a very long time, but eventually decided to give it a shot. I had the typical 2-3 day wait time before my account finally started to work and let me login. I consider myself relatively tech savvy, but felt like I had no idea how to approach Twitter, but I realized that the best way to use Twitter is by tweaking it to get the information you want. By following people that share the same interests as me, or companies/blogs that I visit regularly, I'm able to really make Twitter work for me. Of course, there are people using Twitter strictly for posting lunch course decisions, but I quite intentionally never click "Follow" on their pages. If used correctly, Twitter can save you a TON of time as opposed to RSS reading too.

      I also find that for social networking, this is a much less invasive way to drop a line to somebody (do people use that phrase anymore?) without having to visit their profile.

    • 2 years ago
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