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March 31, 2009
Twitter me this
A recent story on NPR covered different ways that Twitter has been used within business settings, tracking individual consumer spending and even ways to track your diet. Are these tweets cyber-junk, or a new era of an open source applications with possibilities for clever entrepreneurs?
Twitter also seems to be also be shaping some of the more mundane aspects of 21st century life, such as dealing with customer service, but also allows a small business like a taco truck in L.A. or a tea shop in Wichita. The nature of Twitter's instant connection to the outside world (at least, within 140 characters) has given people a chance to almost instantaneously communicate just about anything on their mind. Recent news events in the States and Europe have been reported first, however brief, through this tool (Hudson river plane crash and a German school shooting). While the limitations of 140 characters are present in this tool, there is also a huge potential for this real time application, which more and more entrepreneurs seem to have taken note recently. So how do you filter this growing amount of tweets? Are all these tweets substantial enough to save in some way? Or is this indicating the short attention span of most users (140 characters or less) and a overly hyper-connected culture? A book is in the works for a style guide for short form writing 140 characters or less. Another online guide to writing short entries advises, "avoid "university words". Almost every long word in English has a short, blunt word that means the same thing. Use it instead." Is this dumbing down our writing skills into LOLs and TTYLs?
Perhaps not too much of a surprise, Twitter has the first libel suit on its hands (and perhaps also not surprising, that Courtney Love is involved). Twitter's home page says that "Twitter puts you in control and becomes a modern antidote to information overload." Or is Twitter just adding to the ever growing piles of cyber junk?
Posted by vad17 at March 31, 2009 12:02 PM
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Comments
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Joannah
Posted by: Joannah at March 31, 2009 01:36 PM