hopinet

Twitter, will it last?

12th February 2009

Seemingly twitter is the in craze in the web world at the moment, for those of you who have no idea what it’s about I’ll try and explain. You have 140 letters/characters to say what you’re up to, this is then posted on to your twitter feed which you can either keep private for just your friends to see or allow anyone to see in the ‘public timeline’. Your friends are people you agree to let follow your feed, so in twitter speak these are your ‘followers’. That’s all there is to it really…. oh,you can also add pictures to twitpic as well if you so desire.

There are 2 groups of people when it comes to twitter. The first group are those that say ‘what’s the point?’, ‘what a waste of time’, etc. The second group are those that totally get it. I don’t need to explain anything for the second group as they understand what the fuss is about. Lets just take a look at the first group, what I would say to this group is twitter is not for everyone, if you don’t get it that’s absolutely fine, but all I ask is don’t moan about those of us who do get it. There is no real serious point to twitter, it’s a bit of fun just like any social networking site, if you like Myspace, facebook, Bebo then you’ll probably like twitter, it’s absolutely free so if you haven’t tried it yet why not give it a go.

How are started twittering
I started twittering about April 2008, I mainly started as it was a quick way to update my facebook status without actually having to go on to facebook. I still use twitter to do this and also use my twitter feed to update my lifestream feed on the about page of this blog. My twitter breakthrough was when I got my iPhone, in the early days of using twitter I didn’t update my feed often because I don’t work near a computer. The whole point of twitter is that you tweet when you think of something, when something happens, not hours after it’s happened. With my iPhone, I carry it with me all the time so when/if I think of something I can just tweet straight away. My iPhone really makes twitter work. By the look of people using twitter, a lot use their iPhone in exactly the same way, if you want to get the most of twitter get an app for your iPhone, Blackberry or there are some java apps that will work on most mobile phones.

Celebrities, will it last?
Stephen Fry is probably one of the biggest celebrities who is using twitter (Just to clarify I don’t mean he’s over weight, I mean he is a famous person who uses twitter a lot) and he seems to be one of the main people that introduced twitter into the main stream, first with his interview on the Jonathon Ross show (another celebrity twitter user), then with the picture he uploaded to twitpic of when he was stuck in a lift, this made it into the public domain in the paper the next day. Other celebrities carried on the interest Phillip Schofield, Chris Moyles and they even talked about it yesterday on the BBC show ‘The One Show’.

Will it last, I think what will see is some of those users that have just joined because of all the recent fuss will slowly stop twittering and I include some of the celebrities in this group. What I do think is there will be a core of users that will happily tweet on for the foreseeable future.