Twitter Dee, Twitter Dumb

Twitter is micro-blogging, real-time blogging, or better yet, just users who send and receive short, real-time messages known as tweets.  Each account has followers, but followers don’t necessarily have to be friends.  These tweets are stored, searched, and shared between followers who see your short, whether relevant or not, updates.

Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s co-founder described his creation as “… an idea to make a more ‘live’ LiveJournal, Real-time, up-to-date, from the road. Akin to updating your AIM status from wherever you are, and sharing it.”

Google’s CEO described Twitter another way when he called it a poor man’s email system, “Speaking as a computer scientist, I view all of these as sort of poor man’s email systems.”   Although, his statement is rudimentary, it does have merit.  If you think of Twitter from a technical standpoint, it is easily a poor man’s email system, but a SPAM proof one at that.

You can SPAM your followers who, for better or worse, actively opted in to follow your conscious activity.  However, you won’t get your follower’s tweets unless, of course, you choose to follow them.  So, what we really have is just the evolution of a poor man’s email system that happens to solve what today’s email system can’t, that is SPAM!

Everywhere we turn information is being pushed on us – from ads, emails, text messages, RSS, etc. – we are living in a world of information clutter. Do we really need another communication system?  Does it really matter what your friends or Ashton Kutcher are doing right now?  “Brushing my teeth, just got off the elevator, flying the red-eye in a silver tube at 600mph over the Rockies,” can be too much.  Who really gives a tweet?

Either way, Twitter has become unbelievably popular and is most likely here to stay. Twitter’s active users have increased 900% in a year which leads all social networks including the all-powerful FaceBook.  So for now anyway, the clutter is here to stay.

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