Twitter

In the past few days, I've familiarized myself with such wonderful web technologies as deli.icio.us, Flickr, MySpace, Facebook, Soundslides, Audacity, mobile phone alerts, etc., etc. I already had some familiarity with several of these.

And then there's Twitter. I signed up for it, and I've posted four or five messages. But I haven't the slightest clue what I'm actually doing. In fact, it appears that I'm just talking to myself. I can't imagine how this technology would be useful to anyone, much less to the news industry. Can someone fill me in?

 

This should be fun.

Countdown to the first twatter joke in 3.........2............

 

Why do I get the feeling nobody has the slightest clue what Twitter is?

 

Heelllllllloooooooo......

Is any...any.....anybody....body.....body.......out there.....there.....there......

 

Nobody loves a Twitter.

 

I use Twitter. It's interesting.

Tuesday night, there was a pretty sweet setup using Twitter to track the primaries. They had a Google Map up & the Twitter messages would appear on the map where they were posted. I'm not sure what purpose it served but it was interesting.

 

I thought this thread was about Bobby Knight.

 

I don't even know what Twitter is.

 

Twitters never win and winners never twit.

 

A lot going on with map technology and journalism these days. I understand that Twitter is also useful to give shout-outs about breaking news or just to advertise something. Of course, we already have instant messaging and e-mail.

 

We experimented with Twitter to send text messages for National Signing Day to our readers. It was about a 28-step process to get a person hooked up to get them, so we scrapped it. It is an interesting idea, to be sure.

rb

 

What, exactly, is it?