| | Well, I woke up this morning and went into the restroom. After brushing my teeth and washing my face I looked into the mirror and thought, 'I need to introduce myself to the world. Get out there more....'
And hence I turned on my laptop and opened a Twitter account. You can now follow my life @sbtang, if you so choose. If you do so choose, you'll be enlightened with tweets such as the following.
Your life probably will be changed, you'll probably be inspired to great things, you also might be bored to death, but we'll overlook that.
Alright, all kidding aside, this whole 'twitter thing' I am not exactly sure what to make of it. I'm amazed/confused/drawn by it all at the same time. I am not exactly sure what to do with it or how it fits in my daily workflow.
First of all, do normal people really wake up in the morning and think, 'dammit, the world needs to know about my life!!' Is not that kind of arrogant? I can understand if you are a celebrity, twitter can be a way to reach out to your fans (which i think is cool), I'm on a bunch of celebrity tweets (and when I say celebrity, i mean people like Bethany Dillon, Derek Webb, David Crowder, Shaq O'Neal, Wade Chan) and , because my life is so boring, it's kind of cool to see what they are doing with their lives. But for normal people? I mean who does that? Who has time? Who cares? Wade is one of my best friends and he now tweets, but do I really care when he updates at three in the morning that he has contracted oral herpes? Probably not.
And also, for people who do follow other people.. Why? Are our lives so boring that we need to see what other people are doing with their lives?? And isn't this kind of creepy, stalkerish activity, i mean i guess you can choose who you want to allow to follow you, but still....
That said, I am not here to bash twitter. And like it or not, twitter is here to stay. And it might just be the wave of the future. I believe that all people in the tech industry needs to know what this is and how to use it, so I encourage all my tech friends to at least check it out, and not just write it off as some kind of juvenile application. It's not. Sneakily, it might even be at the forefront of social networking. And people are beginning to notice it. Example. Everyone (by now) knows about the new facebook front page. Look how similar it is to the twitter concept. Is that just a conincidence?? I knew that the Facebook site looked very similar to the twitter site, but when i did this side-by-side comparison... this my friend, is what you call a blatant rip-off.
 
This very interesting article from the San Jose Mercury talks about how Twitter could even be a threat to Google. Imagine that. Right now, Twitter is sitting on (and amassing) an incredible amount of data. What people talk about, what the hot topics are, what the hot stories are, what people are buying, selling, trading, all sorts of information. Imagine if they ever decide to mine this data, and do targetted advertising (the currently do no ads) that could be a huge source of revenue. Twitter could be the new spectrum to determining trends, what is hot, what is not.. People are finding all sorts of creative ways to use Twitter, and it will be very interesting to see how this technology grows, and I didn't even talk about how you can send updates via SMS or post pictures yet.
So those are my thoughts on Twitter. I just started playing with it this week, so I'm sure after a while i'll have more thoughts, and I'm still figuring out the best apps to use and how to do things like send updates from my phone. But until then, I hope you guys would join Twitter cause it's fun and when you are waiting in line, there's nothing else better to do that the Tweet with the Tweeples. |
| | Posted 3/30/2009 1:48 AM - 51 Views - 10 eProps - 5 comments
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