Friends, Romans, Twitizens...

Lend me your ears.

"Twitter" was deemed the "Top Word of 2009" by the Global Language Monitor today.

I died a little inside, at first. Wanting to rant and rave about how much I hate Twitter, I went to bbc.com and just did a search for Twitter. I wanted to find something to read to try and wrap my brain around this Twitter idea.

I came upon an article from Time, posted in June of this year, titled "How Twitter Will Change the Way we Live." I scoffed.

However, upon reading it, I understand the points the author made in the name of Tweets. Below is a list of his top 5 reasons why Twitter will change the way we live.

1) Twitter provides an "Open Conversation"
The author uses an example of how he was sitting in a small lecture which had its own Twitter hashtag, that way those in the hall could Tweet about the event in real time, and all posts could be compiled and found via a hashtag search. This sort of act provides a space for long, open conversation.

The same thing happened to me when I attended the Associated Collegiate Press conference in Austin, Texas just a few weeks ago.

The speaker that commencement address stated that he understood why people would constantly be looking down during his speech - they were on Twitter, talking about the event. The event had a hashtag, and so it was easy to post stuff about the event for people to search for.

In the end, though, I couldn't help but wonder - besides for the entertainment of searching through what people thought of the incredibly droll speaker - what good does this serve?

And in the case of the author sitting in a conference of no more than 40 people (when the conference I attended had hundreds if not thousands of people), what was preventing those 40 people from simply talking amongst themselves without Twitter?


2) Twitter represents what some have dubbed the "Super-Fresh Web"
Essentially, this means that, while search engines like Google return the most efficient or best known results, Twitter provides a chronological, live feed. It makes the web "super-fresh," I suppose.

3) From Toasters to Microwaves
Users are constantly updating Twitter by themselves. The addition of the hash, the @ (to tag someone or someone's feed), and the applications for Twitter (on iPhone, BlackBerry, etc.) were all user-created.

4) News, Opinion, Searching, Advertising
Self-explanatory.

5) End-User Innovation
This is essentially the same thing as number 3. The author mentions that many believe America has been ousted by China and India in the field of innovation in the 21st century, but he brings up that America invented Google, Youtube, Facebook, Xbox, Twitter, etc. And while most argue that "inventing a new mouse trap," as he puts it, is true innovation, the author for Time argues that innovation can also come in the form of user innovation. So, again, the user inventions of the hash, @ tagging, etc. are seen as a positive attribute of the age of Twitter.

Terms from this article that offended me:

Twittersphere - a collection of Tweets? a collection of Twitter pages? I don't know.
Twitizens - users of Twitter? Dumb.
Twitterfied - when something becomes like Twitter, I guess.



The issues I have with this analysis and Twitter in general.
While I agree that Twitter provides a fresh place for posting, sharing and reading newsworthy and interesting articles and pieces, I don't believe it's being used to its potential.

An August '09 study found that, from a pool of 2000 random Twitter posts, 40% were found to be "pointless babble," along the lines of "Hey, I'm mowing my lawn," or "Listening to Raffi, lol."

Twitter's purpose is micro-blogging, and the same issue that occurs in blogging occurs in Twitter. When blogs first became big news, the issue became that anyone can have a blog, there is really no efficient way to filter the good from the crap and a lot of it is pointless babble.

The same applies to Twitter. I guess Ashton Kutcher has a million followers, and he promotes non-profits and charitable organizations through his Tweets. These are all great things, and probably a better use of micro-blogging. However, Jim down the street might have a Twitter which he updates every time he changes his kitchen trash liner.

The Time article states that humans find pleasure in reading about the mundane.

"The technology writer Clive Thompson calls this "ambient awareness": by following these quick, abbreviated status reports from members of your extended social network, you get a strangely satisfying glimpse of their daily routines. We don't think it at all moronic to start a phone call with a friend by asking how her day is going. Twitter gives you the same information without your even having to ask."

I couldn't disagree more. I think we find pleasure in procrastinating and in reading what doesn't matter. That's why Facebook status updates are so consistent and why Facebook invented the "Like" button. You can simply scroll through a million friend status updates, decide which ones you "Like," and commit to this act with no more than one finger and a set of eyes. We're lazy, bored, strung-out, and we don't want to do any real work.

If Twitter users used Twitter at least half of the time to post relevant, interesting or newsworthy facts (either by linking articles or even simply posting a controversial opinion on a matter) it would make Twitter worth the while. Granted, I can't say by the numbers that half of Twitter users don't do this already, but I can only imagine they don't.

We already scroll through shortened news updates on news websites. The link is typically the headline and a small chunk of the lede sentence. This is what Twitter is capable of. Only with Twitter, real people are posting these things - your friends, Jim down the street, your mother and maybe Shaq. People you know are becoming involved with the news, and that is how the future of Twitter should be.

If Twitter continues to be a shriveled social networking site, then it will die in five years. People will move onto the next big thing, and Twitter will be left behind with all this potential.