There has been a bunch of conversation about using Twitter as a serious tool for communication. Josh Catone performs a relatively thorough analysis of the pros and cons of using Twitter as a platform for discourse and discussion. Twitter has definitely been rising in popularity and just in the past few days I have seen a drastic increase in my Twitter followers. I now keep my Twhirl application open more frequently then I have my AIM client open.
Twitter isn’t the only platform for communication in my life though. It is competing with at least 4 or 5 other forms of communication including instant messaging, text messages, email, social networks, blogging and hugging. Twitter is a unique tool because it enables me to choose who I’m conversing with. It’s your own private chatroom that you can join or leave at will. One of the best features of Twitter is that I find out news prior to any other source. It frequently provides me with content to post about in my blog.
As Josh Catone points out though, there are some definite problems with Twitter. The most obvious is information overload. How many message can I possibly respond to in a given day? How do I figure out which messages I want to respond to? With an RSS feed reader I can quickly flip through post titles. On Twitter, every message is practically as short as a post title and as such there is no filtering process.
The biggest problem with Twitter is that it goes down on a regular basis. For some reason, the Twitter team cannot figure out an effective way to keep Twitter up during moments of high usage. Even when Twitter volume is low the site goes down. Whatever the reason for it is, this is one issue that the site needs to resolve immediately. While Twitter may have its flaws, I think Twitter is definitely tipping and becoming one of the major platforms for communication on the web.
Do you think 2008 will be the year that Twitter goes mainstream? Also if you are on Twitter, go follow me.
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