The latest Time has Twitter on Cover and a very nice article by Steven Johnson. I did not think that Twitter has any potential when I first heard about it – so following really resonated well with me:
The one thing you can say for certain about Twitter is that it makes a terrible first impression. You hear about this new service that lets you send 140-character updates to your “followers,” and you think, Why does the world need this, exactly? It’s not as if we were all sitting around four years ago scratching our heads and saying, “If only there were a technology that would allow me to send a message to my 50 friends, alerting them in real time about my choice of breakfast cereal.”
But once I started seeing some interesting applications I realized that it is a very unique thing, particularly:
Put those three elements together — social networks, live searching and link-sharing — and you have a cocktail that poses what may amount to the most interesting alternative to Google’s near monopoly in searching.
In fact, I am personally more interested in Twitter because it brings in the notion of an event as a package that can carry with it information as well as experience. The link-sharing aspect of it along with the fact that time and location can be associated with it, makes it basically an ‘event’ and the same sense that we have been using it in our group. This is truly exciting. We can do some very exciting things with it.