The Sound That is Made By A Bird

Socializing with people has been an important part of our life and now technology has lent all of us a helping hand to make things simpler and easier for us. Multiple social networking sites has sprung out since the start of web 2.0 and the society has pretty much being adopting it to increase social links and also to strengthen social ties.

I would like to talk about Twitter in this post as it makes news this week in which Google and Facebook are both trying to buy it over.

Honestly, I do not have a Twitter account wasn’t planning to acquire one. I thought that Facebook was good enough for me and I do not need another account to keep in touch with friends. Nonetheless, I was pretty much intrigued by the concept of it. It is some what like a micro blogging website in which you are able to send messages or “tweets” of up to 140 characters that will be displayed on your profile. By allowing friends, you also will be able to read their tweets almost instantly. One can also tweet pictures, links, videos and have a mini conversation on Twitter.

Yes, I have been bug many times to create an account as most of my friends have a Twitter account. Desperately to give an excuse of why I do not have an account, I said that I wasn’t able to think of a unique username (I couldn’t think of a better excuse on the spot!). Instead, this excuse backfired on me and my friends kept suggesting a mirage of ridiculous names for me. They even threatened to create one for me if I don’t do it myself.

As compared to Facebook, Twitter does not have that many functions. You could poke, tag, post pictures, videos, play games and scores of other things you can do on Facebook. Twitter has about 190million users (as of 8 July 2010) and is the number 9 ranking based on Alexa Internet research. Compared to Facebook who has 600 million users and rank number 2, Twitter has gained much popularity though it has very simple functions. I had a friend on Facebook who updates his Facebook status almost more than twice hourly and ended up flooding my wall with his updates. If it was something intellectual and funny, I wouldn’t mind, but unfortunately it was just mindless whining. Imagine this friend of mine who does his whining on Twitter, I guess it will be more socially accepted there. In all, Facebook and Twitter both serves different purpose but targets the same audience.

Twitter has many celebrities that use them and that is why many people sign up to ‘follow’ them so as to read their tweets. These celebs are also able to do product recommendations on twitter and allow people who are following them to almost instantly receive the msg. It’s just like having a celeb sms you! Moreover, shops or products that you follow will give u instant updates as compared to Facebook. With apps that are made available on Iphone, Windows or Android phones, users are able to receive msg on the go without having to access it from a web browser.

In conclusion, I think that Twitter will become a very good platform for social networking. It’s like a site concentrating on status updates. Having short and sweet tweets has become the in-thing for a fast pace society like ours. I admit that without a Twitter account, I am missing out the stuff that is happening within my friends on Twitter. Hmmmm, I might consider creating one after my Com125 lecture. Let me think of my Username first…..

Here is for your entertainment:

http://www.tweetbaggery.com/

Cheers!