The Twitter Phenomenon

I started using Twitter for the 3rd time a week or two ago.  The first two times, I stopped watching replies after a couple of days because they were too nosiy for me.  It took the third time for me to start to understand some of the dimensions that Twitter provides. 

To some of my family and friends, it's difficult to explain what Facebook is, and why someone my age would use it. "Isn't facebook for college students, or something?"  Well, I've ben struggling with explaining Twitter even more so.

Here's an excerpt from a post by Angie Swartz, who is going on about her love affair with Twitter.

So, the next thing was a random encounter with a work colleague I hadn’t seen in three years. I started to update him about me. He stopped me and said, “I know all about you Angie. In fact, a bunch of us were just talking about you at lunch. We were talking about how often you update your facebook page. We keep track of what you’re up to and in fact I know who you had lunch with yesterday.” A bit embarassing for me that this friend thought I had nothing better to do than update my facebook page so I asked him if he knew about my friend Twitter. He did not.

This is one way to explain ONE OF THE WAYS that Twitter and Facebook can help all of us in this fragmented and ever-widening world we live in.  While Twitter and Facebook will never replace the face-to-face conversations and individual connections that we should develop, it will help keep us in touch and in tune with our friends and acquaintances around the world, or even in the next building, who we don't have time to speak with as frequently as we'd like.