Evaluating Twitter

This seems like a good time to evaluate Twitter. The article we read during the training week said to give it about 30 days, and I've been on for a little over a month. And this is social networking week, after all!

It is easy to make fun of Twitter. And it was bit difficult to figure out what was going on on there when I first got started. Then, as many have said, it grew on me! I learned that putting @ in front of a person's name let them know the message was for them. BUT, everyone else can still see it. When people put # in front of something, that identifies it as part of the same "trending topic" as all the other posts on that subject.

Twitter seems to have exploded this week. Over the weekend, the big Amazonfail. Later in the week, a contest between Ashton Kutcher and CNN, to see who could get to a certain amount of followers first. Today, Oprah, who had 30,000 followers and she's never even tweeted once, will tweet for the first time live on her show. With Ashton Kutcher as guest. On Twitter, people appear to do #followfriday where they suggest people their followers should follow. So of course, today there's a certain subset doing #unfollowfriday, promising to unfollow anyone who mentions Oprah, Ashton Kutcher or uses the word internets. Tomorrow -- it'll be something else.

On Twitter, I follow a few people I know in real life, and then mostly "celebrity" tweeters. Not the huge names like @StephenFry (who apparently tweets a whole lot), Ashton Kutcher/Demi Moore or John Mayer, but others who tweet about 5-15 times a day: Neil Gaiman, Jon Scalzi, Dave White, J. D. Rhoades, Justine Larbalestier and a few others. Occasionally I branch out, to someone recommended on #followfriday.

The point of all this rambling: I like Twitter. It's fun. The updates of the people I follow are interesting. I learn things. No one's telling me what sandwich they make every day, but they are telling me when gmail is down, that Amazon is censoring its rankings, that I need to go out on the web and find out who this Susan Boyle woman is, links to funny and/or interesting websites or blogposts, and many other things. Dave White photographs silly things he sees while he's out. Justine Larbalestier sent out the covers for her new book. Yes, Twitter can be very trite. But that, too, is part of the fun of it.