Chapman's Log

As a fan of Web 2.0 and social media in general, I try to stay up-to-date with the latest sites that surface in this field. The most popular sites like Facebook and MySpace are where I stay in touch with people I know in everyday life (though MySpace is very seldom logged into anymore, I personally despise it), as pretty much everyone I’m acquainted with has an account at one or both of those sites.

However, sometimes I just want to engage in friendly conversation with people from all over the world without the hassle of all the frosting that comes along with Facebook/MySpace, such as the applications, notes, tagging photos, and the like. That’s where Twitter comes into play.

Twitter is a very simple but extremely powerful site that connects you to a vast amount of people. It revolves around one simple question: “What are you doing?”, followed by a text box that gives you 140 characters to describe what is currently going on in your life. You can type a simple sentence such as “I’m at school in the library.” or you can even post any web address as a link to show everyone and reply to others’ “tweets” (posts on Twitter). There are many other ways you can take advantage of that text space as well.

Many look at Twitter and wonder what the appeal is. They may look at the simple design and assume that it is merely Facebook with everything cut away but the status system. This is partially true, but not completely. When you update your Twitter profile, everyone who is “following” you will see it on their feed and can then reply to it or directly message you, sparking limitless conversations from anything you say. It’s delightfully addictive and the people you meet tends to span much further than the confines of your region of the world.

Another great thing about Twitter is that you can use it to promote your work when you have a lot of people following you. For instance, whenever I add a new post to my blog, I link to it in my Twitter status and fifty people instantly see it. To a greater extreme, my friend Adam Jackson has nearly 2,500 followers. Whenever he posts a link, you can imagine that Twitter most definitely helps with getting the attention of the public.

Even with the previously listed advantages of Twitter, the real reason I come back to it is because it is tons of fun, completely simple, not time consuming to update, and once again, addictive. I can update it from my phone via text messaging, the Twitter website, or straight from my desktop via a program called twhirl. In just seconds I can update my Twitter profile without even having to look at it.

I hope this blog post convinces at least a few people to join the site and give it a shot. With its huge burst of popularity, I’m shocked to see that only a few people I know in real life actually use it, especially considering how simple it is. I know a lot of people on Facebook who update their status in ways that just beg to be posted as tweets.

Hope to see you there!