Tech & Biz

Twitter your newspaper?

by Kaitlin | March 29, 2007 at 08:28 am

1088 views | 0 Recommendations | 2 comments

The buzz on Twitter just keeps growing louder and more forceful--this week the Financial Times even took a run at analyzing the phenomenon. Now, newspaper publishers are reportedly looking at the Twitter model as a way to increase reader response on their online platforms. Whether this will take hold or not is anyone's guess, but it will be interesting to watch. Will Twitter's popularity lead to it consuming itself? Will it's detractors kill it (see the phrase "useless minutiae," below)? Or, will it become the new YouTube?

Twitter is an interesting social networking website that allows anybody to communicate at all times, by asking the questions “Where are you? What are you doing?” This innovative tool makes it easier to exchange - trivial - ideas, thoughts and feelings.

At this moment, there are about 80,000 Twitter users. It isn´t possible to send messages of more than 140 characters, so users have developed new words. For example: twittering means send a message; twitterrhea means a lot of twittering; twittermaps is a technology to find maps.

The Financial Times analyzes the impact of Twitter and seems still uncertain as to its potential use. “Opinions are divided on whether to love or hate Twitter and whether it is full of useless minutiae or useful information.”

0 See all footage | View Slideshow

Share: email story | add to any | | facebook | stumbleupon

recommend This comment thread is now closed

Jordan Yerman

at 11:15 on March 29th, 2007

As a non-twitterer, I am inclined to write it off as hype, but that's not necessarily true... the form is too short to include any in-depth info, but that doesn't make it useless. I see some biz-to-biz use for it (internal communication, heads-up for more info to follow), but I see it as more for social/fun use than anything else. Not that that's a bad thing! As for interactivity with mainstream newspapers, it would be redundand vis-a-vis an online paper, but would be cool for reader responses to content read in a paper newspaper.

bloggi

at 01:57 on March 31st, 2007

Twitter and tinyurl seem to be the live bookmarking tool made in heaven. Also, you can connect to your weblog, update things in real time. The SMS-based user interface though seems pretty hopeless. Too expensive. But add WAP to that and a nice IM client, and you are getting there eventually. BTW: A user by the name of foxnews opened a few minutes ago with "NATIONAL: Five 8th Graders Charged With Laxative-Laced Doughnut Prank" in twitter. Is it genuine or a prank in itself? They report. You decide. :-)