Twitter? Is it all a fantastic waste of time?!
I got sent a link to twitter a few days ago, and was introduced to the wonderful world of interactive timewasting. If you’ve never seen this site, then have a look at http://www.twitter.com and you will see what I mean.
Basically, the idea of Twitter is that you post your thoughts as they occur to you and they not only appear in almost real-time, but an archive of thoughts appear in your profile. You can even, if you would want to do this, get an interactive map of the world at www.twittervision.com and see who is thinking what anywhere on the twitter globosphere.
I was just actually thinking.. and maybe I should not post this on Twitter… that if Twitter had been available several years ago then all this grief over Al Queda could have been avoided.
Osama Bin Laden could have twittered on about ‘the western pig dogs peeing on his bonfire once too often’ and ‘I can’t wait to put one up those western dogs when we blow up those big building in New York’ while Mr Bush could have shown us all just what a ‘committed’ individual he is by twittering on about his wish to clean out the Middle East with a series of neutron bombs before nicking all the oil… Just think how accurate the ‘precision’ cruise missile strikes could have been if, say, the US ships patrolling the gulf had ‘twittervision’ consoles and Osama had not bothered to mask his IP address when twittering his thoughts all over the web…!
Come to think of it, if the inventors of Twitter actually want us to tell all and sundry what we are thinking at random parts of the day, then according to Pshychologists you will get sex references 97% of the day from all males on the planet, and thoughts on kitchen decor from all the women! I think life with twitter in it is going to get very boring indeed…
Maybe, and this is me going out on a limb here… twitter was just an invention purely designed to get loads of targetted links past Goooogles spam filters by Search Engine Optimisation companies, due to Goooogles infatuation with the current influx of online blogs. Surely not?!
October 25th, 2007 at 2:26 pm
How did you know what I was thinking?
January 2nd, 2008 at 4:10 pm
I used to think this and I didn’t “get” twitter when I first heard about it but when I hear people being critical of twitter now because of the “what am I doing now” angle I have to share that it’s really much more than that. It reminds me more of the early days of “personal web pages” especially with free services like Geocites, Tripod and Angelfire. While it’s true you had a lot of people creating junk and useless web site (I was one of them). You would see the crazy animated gifs, midi files playing and photos of cats, etc. We all played around leaving comments on guestbooks, etc. However I am using Twitter for more than it was intended to a point I am using it for *gasp* commercial and marketing purposes.
Here is a list of useful stuff;
1.) Great for spotting trends in the natural stream of various people’s thoughts
2.) It’s helped me write for brevity
3.) I’m able to make “personal” or not ready for prime time “press releases”
4.) Getting feedback from people who are interested in following you
I almost see it as a “stock ticker” of people and I personally try to refrain from posting too much fluff. Sometimes I do try to add some humor but for the most part I don’t want to waste people’s time so I try to post something of value.
Also with Twitterfeed I can pipe my blog and Flickr updates through twitter and past that I can pipe my twitter updates to my Facebook profile.
January 17th, 2008 at 10:44 am
[...] a previous post (see twitter-fantastic-waste-of-time) I suggested that Osama and pals might use the technology to aid their differences against our [...]