Twitter

After a somewhat depressing topic last week, I would like to return to the lighter/everyone-is-talking-about-it-so-I-have-to-talk-about-it-as-well side of life...

Alright. Give me just a second to collect myself. Alright. I think I am ready now:

HI MY NAME IS MEG AND I AM A TWITTER ADDICT.

Yes, it is true. I have been on Twitter for about a year now (@nelson_meg) and I definitely am drinking the Twitter Kool-Aid.

With all the new media buzz about Twitter, I wanted to take the time to explain why I am so excited about it and then to explain why I think that Twitter is not for everyone.

For those of you who have been living under a rock for the past two years, Twitter is, well, kind of a big deal. You can find tweets on major news channels like CNN and Fox. Even Oprah has a tweet account, as if that is supposed to mean anything to anyone.

Anyway, Twitter is a micro-blogging community, where users Tweet(post comments) in real-time on their thoughts, news or activities. I am not going to go into the details but the site was first started so that family members and friends could have real-life insight into the activities of the other members. Essentially the site was founded on the question, "What are you doing?".

Well, just for everyone's information, this is not what the site is used for anymore. Yeah, there is still the occasional "I am eating Cheerios for breakfast." but (and this depends on who you follow) more and more Tweets are providing information as opposed to simply taking up space. One of the biggest examples of this and the impact of Twitter is the Iranian election. If you are not sure about Twitter, go read the posts coming up for the hashtag (a kind of calling card) #IranElections. This event and the reaction to it on Twitter is proof that Twitter is a valuable tool for finding real-time information on current events.

So why do I love it? Well, I work in the Social Media industry and that means that most of my collegues are online, participating in these social mediums, i.e. facebook, pathables, twitter, linkedin, etc. These people tweet about events happening in our community, information that pertains to our industry and about the general outlook of social media. They invest a large amount of time in this medium and therefore, I am able to get value from it!

Secondly, the reason on love social media is because I love seeing what kind of connections can be built and maintained online (I think this has a large part to do with that fact that so many of my friends are far, far away). Be that friend to friend. Stranger to stranger. Company to customer. I think it is amazing how the online space allows us to find and form connections with people of similar interest. And even more amazing, is when those connection online become connections in real life! Great examples of this include BarCamp, Match.com, CouchSurfing, etc.

Alright so that is why I love it. But not everyone needs to drink the Twitter Kool-Aid and here is why:

TWITTER USES UP A LOT OF YOUR TIME!

If you find people to follow, have people following you, or feel a need to constantly reorganize your Tweetdeck like I do (I will leave for another discussion), then you will spend a lot of time on Twitter. You know how you vowed that you would never spend as much time on Facebook as you do now.... well multiply facebook by wikipedia hyperlinks and then you will understand the time drain that is Twitter. I get lost for hours going through the articles and information that my peer group is tweeting about, most of the times forgeting why I turned on the computer to begin with!

So that's my somewhat quick overview of Twitter, why I love it and why you might not want to even delve into it (all though there are more reasons than just time but that is all I want to write about for now... lazy). Let me know what you think! Why you choose to be on Twitter or why you would never touch the site in a million years!