Sunday, May 31, 2009

Twitter - more than microblogging

Hello Folks. Looong time since I have blogged and read one. Feeling lazy more often :). Anyway, I am blogging again and wanted to write about the new (from fame perspective) socializing service, Twitter.


Couple of months back when I started using Twitter, I was so impressed that I recommended the service to one of my friends. I would regret for doing this in 2 minutes, because this is what he said when we were chatting:

"read on the net
Twitter is an incomprehensible, pathetic tool used by self-centered, insecure individuals that believe the world actually cared about their every move :P".
The first thing that came to my mind was how much I liked smileys (very sarcastic or :P).

The next thing I thought was that could have been the only website on earth to have said that about Twitter. But then I saw this video. Most of you would have seen this video by now:



This video was just one perspective of the social service. The first time I used this service I was instantly impressed. My perspective was it was more of "Leave the crap out" social service. Twitter does one thing best and that is to allow users to post 140 bytes of information each time.

More than microblogging, it was becoming a potential tool for something else: Real Time Search. Twitter understood this at a very early stage. A quick FYI: Evan Williams is the CEO of Twitter. He was the one behind Blogger, the tool I am using to write this blog. They concentrated on improving search and now its greatly improved and readily available for all users on their home page. Anything new happening around the world can be first seen or heard on Twitter. After using it for around 3 months I have found lot of things faster than others. Some examples:
1. Google wave
2. Bumptop
3. Linkin park's "New Divide"
4. Nadal out of French Open
5. How many people are excited about Palm Pre
All these are trending topics on Twitter. No other website had the power like this ever before. It also acts as a broadcasting tool. Many celebrities, large firms, reporters, news channels post latest updates via Twitter.

Some time back Gtalk introduced "Share what you listen" by allowing users to share the name of the song they were listening. It was obvious what Google came up with using that information: Top Songs list called Music Trends. Now just expand it from "Music" to "Everything". One word: "Awesome".

Take a look at the Usage section in Wikipedia and decide for yourself.

Enjoy!