Web feats 4: Twitter

This Web 2.0 tool is probably the last one I would get rid of if I had a gun to my head (which I don't). When Twitter first appeared on the scene it was hailed as a 'microblogging tool', but it patently is a lot more than that. OK, so it's restricted to 140 characters, and a longstanding criticism is that you can't be deep and meaningful with such a constraint on your writing. And yet, as millions of users everyday discover, Twitter is extremely expressive, and it is amazing how much you can convey in such as small writing space. I guess you only have to look at Haiku poetry or the book Twitterature (140 character summaries of some of the classic works of literature) to catch my meaning. Twitter also has a number of filtering tools, including DM (Direct Messaging), Lists, RT (Retweeting) and mentions to name a few.

There have been whole conferences dedicated to Twitter, and indeed the networking tool has been used extremely successfully as a conference backchannel. There are already several thousand third party applications that lock into and exploit the power of Twitter, including Tweetdeck, Echofon, Twitpic, Twitgraph and Tweetreach (this one tells you to what extent your tweet has spread across the network). Twitter is gaining in popularity as a tool to build your personal learning network, and also as a viral marketing tool, as well as a guerrilla teaching tool (see my post on Teaching with Twitter). Teachers are waking up to the possibilities of using the Twitter as something more than a simple communication tool. Some even see in it early evidence for a semantic social network, whilst others use it as a personal research tool. Twitter is also a useful tool to use in tandem with other services, but as I have recently argued, most people who don't get Twitter tend not to persist with it, and fail to build a critical mass of follows/followers and therefore miss out on the true power. The ability to connect and communicate with people of like minds all over the globe. My opinion is that Twitter is still emerging, and will build a head of steam in the next year or two as it continues to grow in popularity and increases in functionality. Twitter is definitely a tool I would find difficult to discard.

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Web feats 4: Twitter by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.