Twitter, for the uninitiated, is a microblogging social network site that allows users to make 140-character posts from the web, IM, text messaging, and third-party applications such as Twitterific. It provides the nifty little “badge” on my blog that shows “what I’m doing”, and has recently become quite popular, leading to service scaling issues and fun mashups like Twittervision, which is a really fun way to waste time online.
So what is it about Twitter? For me, blogging requires an investment of time and effort that prevent frequent posting. There are often small things I want to say, not worthy of a fully developed blog post, but rather quips to comrades around the country. Twitter does marvelously for this, providing a dose of fresh content on my blog and a less formal way to project small updates on life, such as it is.
At first I was dubious, but I have a few friends who Twitter and I enjoy seeing their updates throughout the day; it also allows those of us who are in the same geographical area to broadcast locations or plans, aiding in serendipitous meetings. This is not unlike Dodgeball, but Dodgeball is only for cell phone users, and therefore not for me. Dodgeball also has a limited scope, available in 22 cities at the time of writing.
In any case, I’ve become a Twitter fan; as time passes, my friends blog less but generate more distributed content in various microblog formats. Twitter happens to be one of them, perhaps because like so many of the successful “web 2.0″ social network applications, it doesn’t really tell you how to use it. Upon opening a Twitter account, you are provided an input box that asks a simple but philosophically-laden question: “What are you doing?”
There are some interesting potential implications from Twitter adoption. Not long after I signed up, a minor earthquake had Twitterers all over the West Coast updating their status and checking in on their friends. Extending and focusing this sort application into an emergency information-sharing network could be very useful; for example, it could provide the platform for a just-in-time network of friends and neighbors to facilitate easily broadcast of relevant neighborhood news, whether an impromptu potluck or a recent break-in nearby.
I think the best potential adaptations might copy Twitter’s functionality and features to enable quick exchanges among topically or geographically focused subgroups; while email groups or lists certainly fulfill this function in many situations, there are also situations where the many modes of text entry and receipt could perform better than group forums or email lists as an asynchronous but more timely method of information diffusion.