During last week’s “Overview of Emerging Technology” a good portion of the audience indicated an interest in hearing about Twitter, the popular micro-blogging service that is receiving lots of press coverage. The general question people asked is “what’s the point?” I’ve been using Twitter for a little over a year so I demoed how Twitter looks and mumbled through an ad-hoc explanation of why it is useful to me. The short version of what I had to say was: “If there are no people you care about who use Twitter, chances are you won’t care about Twitter; but if there are people you care about who use Twitter, maybe you will care.”
Who do I care about and how do I use Twitter? I follow roughly 75 people people on Twitter and they divide pretty evenly into 3 groups. The first group is my friends, people I know well but don’t usually get to see too often due to geography. The mundane update of “I saw a movie here’s what I thought about” seem dull and trite, but given these are people I actually know well in real life I am interested to know their thoughts and opinions on things, even their day-to-day happenings. In this way I use Twitter to stay in touch with my friends who live far away in a way that was not really possible before. The second group are pseudo-famous people that I suppose I’m mildly interested in. Usually writers; the people in the group share amusing tidbits about their eccentric lives and what new creative projects they’re working on. I don’t consider this use of Twitter particularly interesting or relevant to others. The third group constitutes my professional-development use of Twitter. I follow a group of ~25 people who work in similar fields to me: instructional technology, education technology, research etc. Many of these folks are people I’ve met at conference and Twitter serves as an informal way for me to keep in touch with what they are working on, what they are writing about, and what new projects are developing at their respective institutions. This has been a invaluable source for me in my own projects and has even sparked some informal collaboration with people I’ve never met.
One participant at the “Overview of Emerging Technology” asked about use of Twitter in the classroom. There are people I know using Twitter as part of their classes, but I think it would be fair to label their use as still in the “experimental” stages. There have a been a few articles in the Chronicle of Higher Education about this (here and here), and a new article appeared just this week on Twitter in Higher Education in the US News and World Report worth perusing for those who are interested in hearing more about those topics. Another workshop attendee was kind enough to pass this list of 100 Professors Using Twitter that might be of interest to people.
So is there a point to Twitter? I personally find it a valuable resource in my day-to-day life, but that certainly won’t be the case for everyone. It is probably also important to remember that Twitter might be a fad, the question will be whether Twitter-like tools are a fad or something that will be popular going forward.