Never mind the co-communication aspect of Twitter. Never mind the community building, social networking, or anything else related to multiple-sided discussions. Twitter, in it’s bare bones state is a micro blogging tool (some people hate this phrase) allowing people to create snippets of some kind of ‘information’; be it personal, topical, organizational, or whatever else. While it is NOT a news feed… it essentially is. Sorry guys. The only thing is… you can listen to a lot of different feeds at the same time. Oh and you can talk back.
Look at this guy..
Image taken from: www.MinervaNetworks.com
Wow he looks pretty relaxed and happy in his chair watching lots of different television screens pump out shows of who knows what kind of content. Is this like a Twitter?
I would have to say no.
This is extremely wasteful and you’re not going to be able to make any kind of sense out of any of the content unless you’re Dr. Nash from Ron Howard’s movie, A Beautiful Mind. No, instead, maybe… the NASDAQ studio you always see on CNBC or Bloomberg TV; maybe that is a better representation.
Image taken from: www.media.cnbc.com
If you don’t understand the differences between the NASDAQ studio and whatever room the guy up there is in, then you should watch CNBC. I’ll catch Squawk on the Street and the The Call every now and then before work. It’s like home or something for me in my early morning grumpiness.
Okay, so Twitter is a feed. Hello?… Twitter Feed. But where have we seen feeds before? Sure Yahoo!’s constant news updates is refreshing every minute, same for Google, oh and that PerezHilton.com. That dude updates his feed in time with whenever the minute hand of a clock hits a prime number. But what I’m really trying to say is, your Twitter feed is the simplest way for people to create their own feeds for whoever wants to listen to them, or look towards them for information/entertainment.
If we asked this same group of people to set up an RSS feed reader and get their updates that way, what do you think the majority would say? First of all, if you knew how to do it in the first place… you’d think it was too hard to set it up, actually go into the content itself, and then make your comments that way. Although blog users love that kind of interaction. Why do you think they are always posting tweets like… ryanjin ‘New blog post: Twitter: Pop Culture’s Introduction to RSS Feeds… http://bit.ly/d7MFg Make a comment!!!’ ITS AN RSS FEED PEOPLE
My question for you now is this… how will Twitter utilize these millions of RSS feeds. How will you? While some might consider Twitter ‘non-content’ we essentially are creating gobs and gobs of it. I think the idea of flipping through the channels is an idea that we just kind of need to reevaluate. It’s a little old school.
For more information on RSS feeds check out www.WhatIsRSS.com or look it up in Wikipedia.. and if you’re interested… reader.google.com.
Peace
