May 12, 2008 
Some of you may have noticed a new sidebar area called ‘Twitter Updates’. I could go through and try to explain what twitter is, but I’d probably end up confusing you. I’ll let this very well thought out video explain it instead:
There are quite a few of these services floating around, that will basically allow you to track your friends activity and sharing around the internet. Two others in specific that have caught my eye are FriendFeed and Pownce.
At first I was a little hesitant about what Twitter’s focus was, but after using it for a while I can see it’s benefits.
On thing I personally don’t see the appeal of is using it for personal messages back and forth between two private parties similar to IM. It’s kind of the same idea as the “Wall” on Facebook. I don’t understand the need to make private messages viewable to the general public. I guess, in some instances it’s useful if you could get additional feedback from other on-lookers, and it’s kind of like everyone hanging out in a room together, commenting on each other’s conversations (some people call twitter a combination of IRC, text messaging, and forums). Just not my flavor. But that’s the great thing about Twitter is it has multiple uses. I prefer to use it as a posting mechanism for momentary thoughts, sights or feelings that I wouldn’t want to type out in a full blog post. I like to follow close friends to see whats up, as well as some internet personalities for their links, insights, humor and just general daily discoveries. I think as soon as some non-internet celebrity joins on, Twitter will go mainstream.
So if you’d like to join “the next facebook” hop on over and start following me at www.twitter.com/timjanderson/
