April 25, 2007

My Thoughts on Twitter

Here is a comment I left on Ryan's blog.

I think what a lot of people see in twitter is really it's potential or even what it represents and not it's current state of functionality.

It is really a lot like skype when it was first released in 98 or 99... I signed up the first week or month of public release and it didn't really work well and there wasn't really anyone I knew to call or link up with. I had a couple of poor quality conversations with people in Montana and Australia? I think... And I thought well, that's kind of cool, but so what?

Twitter, in my opinion represents the future of the web in a way that shows how we will be able to communicate and interact with people we know or at least those we trust. The web will soon be is pervasive and if we can provide our profile or virtual presence with the appropriate metadata, that enables realtime, dynamic interactivity within a group without picking up the phone to call or sending an email. I'll just check your status or your last entry and I will make a judgement on how to best interact with you. It will save both you and me time. I will also get your insights and emotions on issues and happenings in realtime. Think about knowing that your wife dropped the kids off at school safely or think of a twitter, flickr, and news mashup that you can go back and look at what you were doing or thinking during a certain time in history.

There are several things that I would do to improve twitter and they need better tools to provide the ability to deal with monitoring anyone outside of my small circle of trust, but its a start.

Twitter is cool and will get purchased by one of the big players for millions. I wish I would have thought of it.

2 comments:

  1. Hi Lee,

    I'm enjoying reading you blog! I'm a learning technologist, writing a reflective journal as a blog (in a similar way to you), partly as a way to improve my teaching and learning practice but also as an excuse to explore learning technologies in general..you know, not just talk the talk but also try ot walk the walk. Anyway, I realised that this blogging thing is much more fun when you start to share ideas rather than doing it alone and so I thought I'd send you a comment...I think your post on twitter really sums up how I feel about this phenomena too. I've had a go, and in general find it pretty annoying and pointless but I think it has potential. The only time I find it really useful is when I want to add a quick post to my blog when I'm not near a computer. That said I'm sure it won't be long before you'll be able to blog directly from most phones.

    Celine
    http://learningandteachingpractice.blogspot.com/

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  2. Celine,

    It's great to see like-mind people. Thanks so much for leaving a comment. My experience with blogging has been really interestng and a real learning experience.

    Lee

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