Twitter Part Two
Here at DCP Dialogue, two esteemed staff members were cooking up posts dissecting what a tweeted publishing world might resemble. This post got Alexander Graham Belled and was a little late to the blog patent office.
So here’s another take on Twitter. I’m going to skip the how-do-you-advertise-with-social-networking question and instead look at the content side of this brave new Internet. Namely, what good is Twitter and how will it be used.
In case you don’t know Facebook’s humble origin story it starts on a college campus (OK, that college was Harvard, but the humble part is coming) with the concept of ranking undergrads by “hotness.” I you were a Harvard student, you logged onto “Facemash” and were given the choice of two undergrads with the instruction to pick the hotter. You were never given the choice to poke either student or pelt them with a rabid vampire sheep, so you can see why the humble Facemash never took off.
If you were an early adopter of Facemash, you never would have guessed that it would grow into the social network behemoth it is today. Not only does Facebook play a huge role in the social lives of a growing number of people, but it got credit for tipping the scales in President Obama's favor last November.
Now the social network du jour is Twitter. Although users can only post updates onto their accounts in 140 character snippets, Twitter has been used in a variety of ways. Take this short list:
Swiss Mountain rescue assistant
Tax preparation software advertiser
Whether or not Twitter ever moves any tax preparation software, take this much from all the recent hoopla, whatever creative new web application is thought of next, bet that people will find even more creative ways to apply it to their lives. Who knows, rebuttals during the 2012 presidential debates might be capped at 140 characters.