I'm just starting to look into Twitter myself, but I think the point of
this article is that Twitter is being used for more than what the
developers had in mind for the technology, or even what any one person
can think to do with it. The more I read about it, the more I realize
there's more to it than I thought there was or ever thought there would
be. The fact that it's growing like it is and has become the phenomena
that it is must mean that it either does something that wasn't done
before or at least is done more easily.
One example that I can think of is text alerts. I can follow sports
teams by just following them on Twitter. Of course, I could do that
before by signing up for text alerts on ESPN or MSN, but I'm sure ESPN,
Yahoo!, MSN and others had to build or sign up for some infrastructure
that handled sending out text alerts. With Twitter, a sports team or a
band can send out text alerts to their followers without having to build
or sign up for such an infrastructure.
I see this as being analogous to other technologies. You could obviously
get content out on to the web before we had wikis and blogs, but wikis
and blogs provided the tools and infrastructure that opened this up to
more than just the companies and people who had the time and resources
to build the web sites and infrastructure to publish this content and
get a dialog going on around it.
I must admit that I thought Twitter seemed trivial and frivolous when I
first heard about it, but I'm glad my limited imagination didn't squash
such a promising and budding technology with so many possibilities.
On 6/7/2009 1:36 PM, David Poehlman wrote:
> I can't think of any thing that twitter does that cannot be done at
> least as effectively by something already out there.
>
> On Jun 7, 2009, at 2:30 PM, Ana Garza wrote:
>
> I like the shared conversation aspect of Twitter. Last December I
> attended a
> national conference on literature and language. One of the presenters
> discussed using Twitter to make communal art. In one instance, a group of
> slammers, rapper-like poets who tend to improvise, asked audience
> members to
> tweet words, lines, and ideas; the tweets were then projected on
> screens for
> the performers to riff from. In another instance, an artist was able to
> project an image onto a building wall; the image had spaces for text, and
> passersby could tweet improvised lines of poetry into the image. This,
> by no
> means, cancels out the sensability and craft of an individual artist,
> but it
> may possibly yield a more honest product. Think of all the awful books
> that
> have been written about blind people, who generally come off as
> pathetic in
> some way. If the sighted writer of the next such book were to elicit
> tweets
> from a bunch of blind people, s/he may develop a mor balanced character.
>
> On a more practical plane, I'm actually thinking about updating my
> cellphone
> to one that supports a screen reader for a couple of reasons. First, I
> find
> that I'm starting to need to use text messaging for work. Second, as a
> freelancer, I can imagine using Twitter to let my regulars know
> whether I'm
> free and available or not. Most of the people I know who use Twitter
> do it
> for practical reasons, to remind each other that they need to stop by the
> grocery store on the way home, to contact coworkers about a job related
> issue, to communicate about an upcoming event.
>
>
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--
Christopher
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