Thursday, April 30, 2009

Twitter revolution



It seems like everywhere you turn these days you hear about Twitter. This craze has been building for some time and Twitter is poised to became the next killer app of the computer world. You may be asking what the heck is Twitter? Well I'll try to sum it up as briefly as I can.

Twitter is a real time messaging service that is very simple and it operates over multiple platforms. Each message or "tweet" can be up to 140 text characters and it answers the basic question of what are you doing. You can follow the message streams of others on Twitter or they can follow you. The whole application is quite intuitive and I find it much less cluttered than Facebook. I won't tell you that Twitter will change your life but I find it a fun thing to do.

I signed up last week so I could follow the ADAPT national action which just wrapped up in D.C. You can read more about ADAPT in last week's post. Anyway it was quite impressive to get updates from the front lines and get live pictures from the protests. I was able to send words of encourage to my ADAPT brothers and sisters while they fought for me and countless others. Sure would have been harder to keep up this seamlessly on Fadebook or via email.

Getting on Twitter is easy and you can be up and running in just minutes. I'd encourage you to give it a try and let me know what you think. You can follow me on Twitter @ markboatman

Peace...Mark

5 comments:

Cindy said...

Got ya Mark. I'm @cindy_tc :-)

LINDA said...

I AM SO SURPRISED THAT YOU WOULD BE INTO 'TWITTER'! LOL
MAYBE, I WILL GIVE IT A TRY. JUST SLOWER TO ABSORB THESE THINGS.
THANKS MARK!
MOM

Kareem said...

I think you can thank me for getting u into twitter... tweet tweet

Wheelchair Hiker said...

I just started using Twitter to see what it is all about. Not sure about it yet, but will give it a month and see. I'm at Irishsea9

Cheers,

Mark

Jason G said...

I will preface my comments by saying that I have not used Twitter yet; however, I have been following all the hype. I do not understand how this application can be good for society. With a limit of only 140 characters, it forces people to use abbreviations and otherwise shorten their thoughts. It continues to reinforce the short attention span generation. In effect, it seemingly dumb this down the conversation.

I love the idea of keeping in touch with friends, and being able to have instant updates is cool to -- such as the updates from the Adapt action. But how was the best option? At least with Facebook you can use more than 140 characters and you can upload pictures (I suppose you might be able to upload pictures with twitter to0). With Facebook and blogs you get a much richer experience. And I take exception with the idea that Facebook is cluttered as it has a very intuitive interface. Even the mobile application for your phone is easy to use. Facebook is very much unlike MySpace which allows people to do stupid things with their pages and generally makes a mess of finding actual good information about your friends.

Of course you and your friends may disagree, I would be interested in your further thoughts.