In every lifetime… something comes along which changes the way we see things. The way we hear things, and the way we say things. In this lifetime that something… is Twitter. Excuse my movie trailer narration voice. I’m getting a little carried away admittedly. So, why Twitter? What is it about Twitter that makes me so addicted to it? After all, it’s just going onto a website and telling people what I’m doing in under 140 characters. What’s so appealing about that? I’ll tell you.
There’s a much deeper side to Twitter than most people think and it can actually be more than a social networking and micro-blogging website. That’s what it’s initially developed and designed to do but there’s another side to it which people tend to miss. And critics automatically point out it’s over-simplicity without considering third-party websites. A fail on their behalf.
Twitter is more like a medium. You’ve got desktop applications like TweetDeck and Twhirl through which the majority of people use Twitter nowadays. On the other side of the fence you’ve got websites like Twitpic and Twiddeo on which content that is otherwise not available on Twitter can be uploaded and shared. Twitter has practically turned into the fence between these two points with just a few people still using Twitter through their browser in place of the more popular third party apps. So…
If Twitter has become an over-simplistic medium, why use it?
Well it’s become a news resource. People go onto Twitter to find out the latest news about things they’re interested in, cut down into bitesize chunks. Alternatively they use it to post their own news and thus generate a wider viewpoint of the world. And it’s so easy as well.
Twitter has also turned into a major communication platform. It’s like a public text messaging service from your PC, or if you hook up your mobile to Twitter, even your phone! There’s less privacy that way obviously but that’s where direct messages come in. Again, it’s so simple to achieve.
While Facebook may maintain the throne overall, Zuckeberg’s brainchild is fast becoming a place where teenagers fire useless information around and play Farmville. If you don’t want the hassle of chavs, excess spam, pointless pokes and ridiculously trashy applications, Twitter is the place for you.
Facebook obviously fired back with Facebook Lite, a version of the social networking giant with all the frilly bits castrated. But it’s just not the same. You’ve still got no way of accessing simple news feeds through Facebook as easily as Twitter’s approach of simply whacking your interests into a search box.
At the end of the day it all boils down to the fact that you can’t help but become addicted to something that’s so easy to use but which can have such interesting results. One day you’ll tweet something and get a reply from someone on the other side of the world before realising that they’re very high up in Microsoft.
Twitter is addictive for many reason. Each person has their own personal reason. End of.
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