At the end of the day it entirely depends on the user on how they would like to use these plethora of social networks, but this is my take on the social websphere and a beginners guide to twitter :P :). -My take not being too technical, but from the perspective of an everyday user with a little more analysis, when scratched a little more on the surface.
There are so many social networks these days. Gone are the days when a bunch of kids used to hang out after school and do stuff like pranks, play and do other things about which we do not talk.
Now they prefer sitting at home and doing most of it virtually on the computers. The frequency and the time spent on real-time interactions and communications has definitely taken a beating. They have created virtual networks on the computers, and doing which is the 'in-thing' to do. This is where the money and people are, so this is where the new investments are (lately) too. There have been huge success stories, the likes of Facebook, Myspace, Orkut(google) and YouTube, to name a few. Not surprsingly many new ones keep coming up everyday. One such social network has been 'Twitter'.
I wasn't too keen on twitter to start with. But after some discussions with friends, primary among them a Munmun and its visibility almost everywhere around me, I took my first steps in the 'Tweet-world'. It wasn't that difficult to adopt to, was an easy progression and then started the game. Slowly the focus shifted from facebook to twitter and that's where I am standing right now.
I like to tell people what I am doing and share information with friends and/or strangers with similar tastes as mine. When I was naive to the whole twitter era, I felt Twitter is similar to facebook's status updates. Now if I look back at it, the difference is that in facebook you push your news to almost everyone in your friends list, people who might not even know what you are talking about when you are talking about touchdowns and football. In twitter, on the other hand, only people who know football and care about touchdowns will follow you. Plus, another good feature in Twitter is, 'you don't have to follow your followers' - meaning you follow someone only because you are interested in doing so, not because they are interested in following you, like say the 'friends' concept in facebook. So the whole concept of 'friends' in facebook has been transformed to 'followers' in twitter.
So to say Twitter and facebook serve different purposes. Facebook is more like a social website where your aim is to befriend as many people as you can and network in the process. Of late facebook has also become a good source of video-sharing. The concept of 'friends' has not explicitly been defined in youtube. YouTube is good for videohosting, but in terms of social interactivity, it still depends on other social websites like Facebook and Myspace. Facebook excels at the concept of 'events ', where in you are able to spread the word about invitations to a large group of people.
Twitter is more specific where you choose to follow only people who might interest you and is a very good source of specific news being pushed to your door-step. It specializes in bringing specific personalized news to the reader's (consumer) door step, instead of the traditional method of consumers reaching out and picking information that interests them the most, from a plethora of junk. Also Facebook is good for creating a good fan base like communities/groups/pages, etc but I don't think Facebook has been able to really expolit the fan base, after creating them. This is where Twitter has been able to capitalize and use the power of fan base for some good. I feel Twitter is in a better position to harness the powers of a fan base and reaching out to a huge mass of like- minded people. Next, 'Trending topics' are something unique to Twitter, which facebook doesn't have. The concept of hashtags (#) , retweets and lists only work to make Twitter better at what it is.
hashtags (#) lets one know of the 'trending topics' and reach a specific audience ( esp strangers). This proves a good point to twitter being as a good source of news. Re-tweets is a new concept which lets other users re-send your information/updates to other people, thus resulting in spreading of information across the web. Lists are a new concept, which lets the users segregate information on the tweet-space. These are similar to the bundles in other news pushing devices. More about twitter as a news source in another article.
No comments:
Post a Comment