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Snowed In? DO get in a Twitter
April 16, 2007

If you are snowed in here in the Northeast and already spent your weekend playing with ToonDoo (and who could resist a tool that cool and fun!) then...well...let's DO get in a twitter. If you haven't heard, Twitter is the new "thing" on the web. In a nut shell, this is a real-time status blog sort of thing - you use Twitter (noun) to twitter (verb) what you are doing right then. As in I used my cell phone to send a text message to twitter my status as "Home and gaming!" when I got a snow day this morning. You can see what (and where) people are twittering using TwitterVision, a real-time Google Maps mashup that overlays new twitters on a map of the world.

There is a bit of controversy over this new service. Some say, and I might tend to agree with them, that this just gets too personal. Why should I "micro-blog" everything I am doing as I am doing it? Would it not be better, as Robert Frost might say, to stop and watch the woods fill up with snow? Or can you imagine Frost whipping out his cell phone to send his 140 character or less twitter that he is "Yellow woods - two roads diverging. Which one to take?"

Twitter supporters claim that this is simply a natural extension of social networking. If you have a group of friends that are spread out around the globe, you can't be physically present to have that daily connection with what they are doing in their lives. Twitter allows people to share their small activities (the ones that might not otherwise come up in a blog or a conversation) to maintain social connectivity. I can certainly see the potential for this. As someone with many old friends and new blog friends spread around, Twitter can certainly help to maintain a more personal relationship.

Either way, Twitter and new services like it are probably here to stay. If you haven't yet used all of the features on your cell phone (it has a camera!?!) then I would recommend sitting down with a middle school or high school student some time and talking to them about their phones. These devices - so much more than phones anymore - are really the next generation's always-on connection to a social network. Maybe we can find some ways to make them an always-on connection to our information networks as well?

Posted by Chris Harris on April 16, 2007 | Comments (0)