Twitter asks, What are YOU Doing?

Posted in web 2.0 on 13. May, 2008

Williamedia\'s Birthday PartyIn the days of social networking sites gaining more and more exposure, there's one in particular that I find personally the most satisfying.  Twitter is becoming one of the most talked about social networking platformsthat is currently on the web today.  Twitter has been explained as "the center of the internet" by Geekbrief's Cali Lewis.  We've all read by now how a student twittered his way out of jail and there are beginning to be more and more stories of how effective this medium can be.  Still, there are a lot of people out there who don't understand Twitter. 

One of the reasons I find this social medium to be exciting is because of it's social networking power.  You don't necessarily have to have 4,000 friends to create influence on Twitter.  If you can grasp the concept of sending a text message on your cell phone, you can understand the functionality of Twitter.  Twitter only allows you to write 140 characters within each message (or tweet) you send out to the "twitosphere".  This not only makes those who enjoy brevity and simplicity happy, but it also gives each person the opportunity to follow and actually read a lot of people's "what are you doings".  There's no long blog post to read, no video to sit through and no gallery of pictures to sort.  There are just short and brief announcements from your followers/friends that can range from what you're currently doing to the world's latest breaking news event.

Just last week, Cali Lewis and Neal Campbell from Geekbrief.tv decided to host a birthday party for their intern, William.  Instead of organizing this birthday party with paper invites or even sending out an Evite as most would do, Neal and Cali decided to invite friends of theirs that are on Twitter.  What better way to announce this than on Twitter?  It literally became a Dallas Twitter party within a couple of hours.  This is what I find so appealing about this medium.  It's social!  It's live.  It's always updating on the lives of your friends. The birthday party was a success and we had a great time getting to know our Twitter friends in real life (attached are two pictures from the Dallas Twitter birthday party).

Another reason I particularly like Twitter can be summed up by a personal example.  Daniel Dessinger from Culture Feast sent out a tweet last week asking anyone who was interested in writing for his blog to message him back on Twitter.  I pounced upon this awesome opportunity.  Within minutes he had sent me another reply giving me the guidelines, details and instructions and thus I began writing for Culture Feast.  I can't think of another social networking site that gives you the opportunity to meet so many people in such a quick amount of time.  The ability to keep up with 100 people's lives and current situations is so much easier than it is on other social networking sites, in my opinion.

If you still aren't convinced, I would love to suggest you watch a quick film made by the geniuses at CommonCraft titled "Twitter in Plain English".  They give an excellent explanation of why you should start using Twitter.  If you're on twitter, please follow me @jeffmccord.

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