Twitter: useful or useless?
A few weeks back, a friend of mine joined Twitter and stated an opinion of what I think many people have of the micro-blogging service: it’s kind of pointless.
To a degree, I must admit the value of Twitter is extremely on the fence. Should you use it? Is it worth your time? Frankly, I haven’t completely made up my mind yet about the service, although I do use it quite frequently to “tweet.”
Primarily, I use Twitter as a way to update my Facebook status. I know, I’m just contributing to the terrible signal-to-noise ratio of Facebook when I do that, but it’s a way for me to pass my time and update friends that are just as addicted to the newsfeed as I am. To do this, I use two keep applications.
The first is TwitterBerry, a free application for the BlackBerry. Typically, to use Twitter from your cell phone, it uses SMS text messages to allow you to update and also receive your friends’ notifications. This can get quickly out of hand and quite expensive. Imagine if you have dozens of friends, Twittering all day. Your phone would be vibrating all the time with new texts and you’d be racking up fees. That’s what makes TwitterBerry so great. It uses your BlackBerry’s data plan to send and receive updates. You could also use Twitter’s mobile-friendly site at http://m.twitter.com/ if you wanted to, but TwitterBerry’s a nicer solution I feel.
Second, I use the Twitter application for Facebook. This allows you to integrate your Twitter updates into your Facebook status. When you update Twitter, your Facebook status updates as well. It’s two birds with one tweet.
But outside of just updating my friends about my personal status, what good is Twitter? What about that idea of having utility and value? Twitter, as it’s being used primarily, is indeed pointless. That is, unless you find some usefulness.
Here are some ideas of how Twitter can be made useful:
+ Live blogging an event — Because you can update it from your smartphone with relative ease, Twitter makes perfect sense for situations when you don’t have WiFi (or maybe don’t have a laptop with you) to update your readers about breaking events. This isn’t a new idea and it’s been used in various forms by several news organizations.
+ Notetaking and reminders — I don’t always have paper and pen with me, but I always have my phone. Sometimes I’ve fired off a quick tweet to remind me about something later. Granted, you probably have a memo pad or Gmail on your smartphone already, but it’s a thought.
+ Notifying others of new blog posts — I see this done all the time with Twitter and widgets added onto WordPress. Check out TwitterFeed.com or AlexKing.org for some good examples. At some point, I’ll actually install these.
+ Entertainment — For example, check out Ana Marie Cox’s Twitter feed, as Jeff Jarvis recommended. She’s hilarious and the medium captures her wit quite well.
I will admit that Twitter can become a bit spam-ish (or is that bacn-ish?) if you follow too many people. While some people have chosen to follow me, I’ve made the decision to not follow all of them back. Frankly, I’m just not interested in what they have to say. And I don’t feel bad if people aren’t interested in following my Twitter feed either. Social tools shouldn’t mean social obligations, it should be about providing utility.
Is Twitter a “must-use” service? No, I don’t think so. It’s worth knowing what it is, but I don’t think that most people will find it all that useful beyond the superficial. And if your friends aren’t even on Twitter, actually using it might be kind of pointless.
Still, it’s another way of increasing your arsenal to distribute information and media companies can benefit from it’s ability to distribute via SMS. I’m more interested to see how traditional organizations use Twitter than what random users are tweeting about. If Twitter spurs a better way to receive information than e-mail alerts and RSS feeds, then I think maybe my mind might change about it. Until then, I’m not completely optimistic that Twitter’s going to revolutionize the way we communicate information.
Technorati Tags: Twitter, TwitterBerry, BlackBerry, smartphone, mobile, microblogging, Facebook, liveblogging, WordPress