To Tweet or not to Tweet

Twitter is a rapidly growing micro-blogging application which allows users to post one sentence summaries of their activities.
For those of you unfamiliar with Twitter, here is a brief summary,

twitter-logo1Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length which are displayed on the user’s profile page and delivered to other users who have subscribed to them (known as followers). Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends or, by default, allow anybody to access them. Users can send and receive tweets via the Twitter website, Short Message Service (SMS) or external applications. Souce:Wikipedia

Basically, with one click you can follow and connect with your friends, celebrities and perhaps top names in your professional field.

But then what?

My opinion is that Twitter’s lack of purpose only furthers the impression that it is yet another unnecessary celebrity-driven success in a sea of online time-wasters.

Does anyone see any potential benefits for using Twitter, especially relating to engineers?

Similar Posts

4 Comments

  1. This is funny.
    A Twitterer was tweeting about her Caribbean vacation while on vacation.
    It so happened that one of her “followers” was a crook who discovered an opportunity to make an unscheduled shopping trip to her house.
    Jack..

  2. The thing about twitter is that, despite being built as a social medium, it’s design is so minimalist, it lends itself to other uses, such as search. Facebook is so heavily saturated with inborn tools and feeds, messages, wall posts, events…it’s restricted itself to social use, the main reason why advertising on facebook hasn’t really paid off yet. The beauty of twitter is that it can be anything we want – A social Forum, A Crowdsourcing/Seach Engine or more. By basing the design in open conversation, you can take any concept and impose it on twitter, effectively shifting the focus of your initial concept toward one based on dialogue & user generated content – Like twitter is doing with search. But this premised can, theoretically, be applied to any paradigm!
    Treesha Simpson, PE

  3. I say do not tweet. Twitter is nothing more than a cyber herd movement with a lesser purpose than facebook or multiply.
    A site that is built around one question, “What are you doing?” is potentially one of the most clever creations, but it seems to be geared towards people without important things to do except update the world on their whereabouts.
    While cyber technology continues to advance, it’s consequently robbing humanity of the human relations.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.