Do you remember when Twitter was a word that only the tech-savvy crowd might have heard of? It was back in March of 2007 that I finally started paying attention to what Twitter was, only because there was so much buzz about it on the blogs I was reading. Between then and now, Twitter has experienced all kinds of growing pains, including outages from traffic overload. Some start-ups don’t survive the pains of growing, but amazingly enough, they managed to overcome them.
About two years after the early adopters really started getting into micro-blogging via Twitter and telling the world in 140 characters or less, what was going on in their lives, “Twitter” and “Tweets” are now common household words. Twittering is even becoming popular among stay-at-home moms, in part thanks to Oprah Winfrey’s recent decision to join in on all of the Twittering fun. She’s one of many celebs who Twitter (or have someone Twitter for them), including:
- Stephen Fry
- Ashton Kutcher
- Britney Spears
- and the list goes on…
Even the radio station I listen to in the morning is all about Twittering, with all of their big DJs detailing their lives in those 140 characters. Two years ago I could guarantee that 99% percent of my friends hadn’t heard of Twitter, and now they’re all about Twittering all day long. Despite this, I still haven’t felt the urge to join them. Yes, I do have a Twitter account, but the last time I updated was way back on July 15th last year. Yikes!
While I’m reminiscing about social networking, do you remember when Facebook was only for college students and it was plain and simple? Now it’s open to anybody in any age demographic, and it’s being cluttered with countless applications. Case in point…. my 60 year old mother is on Facebook and prides herself on how well her virtual Facebook Farm is doing. All of her friends are doing the same thing…
I only use Facebook’s Twitter feature. I don’t use Twitter that often.
why even HAVE twitter if you can just update your facebook status. Just creates another direction for us to go in to avoid having a STANDARD, which would be nice.
I don’tn get it, we always are trying to bring more people to the computers and now you are jealous of the farm of your mother in facebook…
I agree!
I don’t know but I have no need either for FaceBook or Tweeter. If I need to contact somebody I just use Yahoo IM, my cellphone or an e-mail. Peace of cake.
I’ve been using Twitter for few months now, and here are couple of notes on my experience.
The difference between Twitter and Facebook is that on Twitter you network with people you didn’t know, where as Facebook is usually used for high school friends or family or coworkers. It can be used to network, but it’s not designed that way.
I think there are different services serving different purpose. For instance you wouldn’t use Linkedin to chat about your daily life, it was designed to network with professionals and to build a network.
As a freelancer it helps me build a network and build my brand. There are massive information that comes in and you need to filter it out, but at the end, I’ve connected with more than 300 people world wide that I’ve never knew existed before. People who we get to know and learn from each other, sharing links and short stories.
So yes, Twitter could be useless to some people, same as some don’t see the relevance of keeping a blog. Why would you write about what you are doing every day? Well, for one thing, imagine when you did a market research on how many people are buying a new PC? [search.twitter.com]+a+pc
You’ll get instant result in 22 second. I don’t know about you, but I’ve never seen more powerful tool that could deliver results in 22 second.
Sure media got this out of proportion, that’s what they do, and that’s what they are good at, but this will be bigger than Google. You can quote me on this and you can quote Gary Vaynerchuck:
See the second video on the page: [garyvaynerchuk.com]
If you come to the Twitter side, look me up..:) [twitter.com]
Very good example! I actually use the search feature for finding out what people are saying about things like new apps, websites, gadgets, and some other things. It’s typically honest feedback that isn’t sugar-coated, and that’s what I like about twitter.