When Twitter first hit the scene a couple years back, I wasn’t really sold on it. I thought it was a little self-centered and other than the instant social text messaging, I didn’t really see any benefit to it. How was I going to get my friends to jump on it and start using it as a way to communicate? So why have I changed my mind on it, and why today am I advocating it’s use?
Changing Communication
Lets first look at all the forms of communication that have been available to us in the near past – email, the phone, snail mail, instant message, yelling out the window. They all have mainly served one purpose – one to one communication. Emails and yelling out the window are the exception acting as a one-to-some communication. There are only two that broke the barrier of the one-to-some communication – blogs, websites and social networks – with social networks being the first many-to-many communication.
Where does Twitter come in? Let me talk about what hasn’t worked with social networks so far, I mean we’ve been developing them for ten or more years now and people still ask – what’s a social network? They are still very contained in their own silos – but api’s and open networks are starting to blur those walls. Applications are being built to run in multiple social networks like OpenSocial – with data as the driving force.
Back to Twitter. It was an amazingly simple concept that turned out to be way more groundbreaking technology than anyone could have foreseen. Why? It’s really the fact that the communication and the platform are really open to the public and we can do what ever we want with it. We can use it as a means to let our friends know that we’re headed out to drinks, or we can build applications on top of this that can do some pretty crazy stuff.
Twitter, because of the ability to use your mobile phone to post and the instant reach that it has, it’s been the first to break news including the recent UK earthquake.
Twitter as the data to applications
So it really started as a micro blogging platform, but has since grown. People are taking this publicly available data and working applications around it. There are to-do applications, shopping list apps, and lots of mash ups (like this Google Maps/Twitter Mashup)
Lastly, this is one of my favorites, this may seem pretty crazy, but you can use twitter to “notify yourself that your plants need watering“http://blog.twitter.com/2008/02/little-shop-of-twitters.html. This one is pretty far out there, but you can see the potential.
How do we spread the adoption of it? Get the word out – which I’m doing right now. TWITTER!
I'm Brad Cooper, a user experience designer and front-end programmer with a passion for actualizing visions. I strive to create a piece of art in each site that I put together both visually and technically.
