#19 Discovering Web 2.0 tools

Twitter

The Web 2.0 tool that I chose to explore was Twitter. I was attracted by the name, and I haven't got to try it yet, because it's a little scary to me, but I think it's an interesting idea. Basically Twitter lets you send out short updates (up to 140 characters) about your status as often as you like per day. Then everyone who is in your network will be able to see them, and you will be able to see the updates for all of your friends. Groups of friends or family can keep updated on each other's lives that way in minute detail. And some companies are also taking advantage of this for marketing purposes.

I couldn't really see using this because I think that most people don't really care when their friends are "at work" or "eating soup" or whatever. Most people's lives are really boring. But it would be good to send out important information to a lot of people at once like "it's a girl!" or something like that.

Maybe libraries could use it to help keep on top of what's going on in the library system. Each branch could post anything important and all the others could stay up to date. It's nice that Twitter limits it to such short messages, so that only the most important things will be posted, rather than like a forum or a blog where sometimes there is too much reading to be practical for everyone. In fact, some people call Twitter "micro-blogging" which seems like a pretty accurate description to me.