When I was in my first year of law school, I was in an informal study group with several of the people in my class. One of the girls in my study group was the first person I knew on the then-new Facebook. She was sitting their checking the profiles of some people that she went to undergrad with. While we were waiting on the other people, she started telling me about how I should jump on the facebook bandwagon, how it was going to be really big – bigger than MySpace. At the time it was only for students. I remember thinking it was a tremendous waste of time. But I ended up signing up. I don’t check my account very frequently anymore – just occasionally, but I can’t discount it’s ability to keep people connected. I know more about what’s going on with my closest friends than I would without it. On the other hand, I also know a lot more about what’s going on with lots of people that I’m really not that close to.
The most recent thing to go viral, it seems, is twitter. I see multiple news stories a day about twitter. Hundreds of celebrities and journalists are on twitter. Because the buzz around twitter was overwhelming, I decided to sign up today. If you’d like to follow me on twitter, you can click here. Please do.
If you’re anything like me, the idea of twitter sounds pretty useless. They offer an opportunity for you to answer the question: What are you doing now? It’s essentially broad based instant messaging. In fact, you can do the exact same thing on facebook, which offers a box that says, what are you doing now? So what’s the difference? For one, lots of top journalists, authors and celebrities are on twitter. Lots of stories are scooped on twitter first. It’s an incredible news source for almost anything you’re interested in.
For instance, I’m a baseball fan. In particular, I’m a big fan of the St. Louis Cardinals. On twitter, I can follow a variety of different bloggers and journalist to essentially give me up to the minute news about the Cardinals. It’s ability to link to news that interests you in particular is one of the strengths of twitter. It’s something of a news feed – about the things and people you’ve stated you’re interested in by following them. You can follow ex-GE CEO Jack Welch, athletes like Shaquille O’Neal, movie stars, journalists, bloggers, and just about anything else you can think of.
The neat thing about twitter is that it’s an interactive conversation. It’s crowdsourcing at it’s finest. You can ask your followers questions and get hundreds of answers and rationales (assuming you have that many followers). It’s easy to see why so many people are so into something that’s seemingly useless. I drug my feet, and I’m late to the party, but after one day on twitter, I could see myself becoming one of them. Thanks for reading.
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