Twitter is single handedly changing the way i and many other people use the internet. Google would be idiots to not buy it out imo (when you look at what else they’ve bought – feedburner and youtube). It is, in effect a human search engine, a social network and a ‘live’ msn type chat facility all rolled in to one. It’s also many more things but all you need to know is that it’s big an it’s only going to get bigger 😉
The growth has been rapid – over the last 6 months in particular. In 2009, i’ve posted over 600 ‘tweets’, gained over 900 followers and followed about 1600 people myself.
Because i’ve added only people that are of interest to me (friends, web design, seo, tech people etc…) it means that if i have a question related to technology, there is always someone that can give me an answer and help me out.
And vice versa of course… if you don’t thank people or return the favour at a later date, it doesn’t look good… it doesn’t help relationships. But recently, there’s been a mass influx of non tech people to twitter which is a problem (for me anyway). It’s tempting to follow people if they’re interesting, but it also reduces the quality of the information i’m receiving.
I don’t want to reject people i know 🙂 but if they’re not talking about the stuff i like, it takes me more time to filter through the information i get to get to the good stuff. That side of twitter can quickly turn it in to a time drainer and de-rail you.
Tweetdeck groups help solve that problem, but when you’ve got plenty of friends and are following plenty of people, you can never have enough organization. I know Kenny Egan (irish olympic boxer) shut down his twitter account for this reason (amongst others too) and Niall Harbison temporarily ditched twitter for the same reason, so it’s a common problem – basically it’s a distraction.
How can you use twitter without time wasting and getting dragged away from work? OR is twitter ‘work’? If you’re building contacts and networking daily, surely that’s a positive thing? So the fact twitter is becoming mainstream is a big problem. It needs more organization and that’s why Google should buy it – to integrate it with google search results and market it more as a live /real time search engine.