Wednesday, July 29, 2009

The Usefulness of Twitter

So I am also on Twitter now. I'm still skeptical about twitter's usefulness. How much vital news exists which is transmitable in under 140 characters and unlikely to be covered by the MSM or google news or the blogosphere or facebook status updates or texts from my friends or handwritten letters from my mother? I have found my first such piece of news:

THE_REAL_SHAQ:
Its official, today is david beckham is scared of shaq, day, he should b scared, he can never score a goal on me,

1 comment:

Pete Abbate said...

1. Follow Dwight Howard (funnier than Shaq).

2. Follow Lance Armstrong (gave daily updates during TdF, interesting guy).

3. I assume you only joined Twitter as a response to Erik's comment about it being a great uniter. If you didn't see said comment, though, take a look... there is certainly usefulness to Twitter.

4. It's not that the mediums you mention won't cover news, it's that Twitter will cover it first. News of the recent Pirates trades was broken first on Twitter; I sat on Twitter for most of July 1, the first day of hockey free agency, because that's where all the signings were being announced first. Follow a few beat reporters and you'll start to see that phenomenon.

Compared with the totality of knowledge which is continually utilized in the evolution of a dynamic civilization, the difference between the knowledge that the wisest and that which the most ignorant individual can deliberately employ is comparatively insignificant. ~Fredrich Hayek in The Constitution of Liberty