Twitter's Usefulness

I've been a Twitter user for some time now but, while a lot of people I know use it all the time, I really haven't found much use for it.  I'm not terribly interested in the minutiae of what people are up to.  Actually I am but I rely on the status updates of my Facebook friends for that.  They're not as real-time as Twitter but it suffices for me.  That's also one of the reasons that I don't update much.  Another big reason is that updating by text isn't (yet?) properly supported for the UK.  If Twitter came out with a blackberry client, I'd update much more but doesn't look like they do.  There seems to be a client made by a 3rd-party developer but, I dunno, I want to see a bit more traction before I trust it on my blackberry. 

Twitter's real-time nature makes it perfect for of-the-moment updates from events, which many picked up on during the recent tragedy in Mumbai.  JP muses further about the uses of Twitter during emergencies:

"Here’s a list of some of the things I witnessed in Twitter these past days:

• People used Twitter to find other people, loved ones, relatives, friends, acquaintances. They provided status updates to others who needed that information. Person to person communications. Hospital lists. Sadly, even lists of those that perished. A classic crowdsource-able activity, reducing the workload on emergency services personnel. Most of the time, the tool used was a mobile phone with a camera.
• People used Twitter to raise awareness of the need for resources. Blood. Food. Money. Shelter.
• Twitter became a go-to-place for important telephone numbers, particularly for overseas contact numbers.
• Twitter also performed one other critical function: the democratic nature of the beast meant that the voices of extremists and rumour-mongerers was drowned out."

I've also found it useful to track the goings-on at, say, an industry conference.  So I'll continue to use Twitter sporadically, especially for following events, but it doesn't yet provide me with the utility to make it a part of my daily life as with, say, Facebook. 

Comments

[Jeremy Meyers]

If you expand your definition of twitter from "basically a stripped down FaceBook where you can tell your friends what you do all day" to "a way to share concentrated, 140-character bursts of content with a tribe of loyal followers, and to quickly and simply add yourself to other peoples tribes," maybe the value will become more apparent?