Can anyone explain to me what this is good for? I basically know how it works, it's 'microblogging' from any number of devices - but really, do I have to tell that world that I'm sitting in a café drinking a bubbly water with a dash of lemon? Anybody here using it?
No, although I see how it could be interesting. I like the the little 'What I'm doing...' tab in Facebook.
Could be fun if you had a lot of RL friends using it. I have looked at it briefly and I failed to get any enjoyment from reading the inane details of random peoples lives though.
I would imagine if someone set it up so that a calendaring app running either server-side or on a computer could auto-update it with your locations (i.e. "I'm in my Human Computer Interaction class.") and such, it might actually be useful. Otherwise...meh. Just another Web 2.0 Tech Demo gone awry.
My take on Twitter in someone else's words: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18445274/ "Hourly updates on your best bud’s activities get dull pretty fast even if your best bud is Jack Bauer: “woke up feeling all angsty…left arm tingly” “oh noes…shot curtis today :-(” “thinkin i gotta torture this guy. oh well” “can’t remember last time i peed” "
It's handy if you've got a lot of people following you, that you follow with it as well (Mine's here.). So, if you've got a brain fart, and can't remember the name of the guy who starred in that movie all of you saw last week, and you can't even remember the title of the movie (so you can't look it up on IMDB), you can just Twitter "Hey! Who was that guy in that movie we saw where he got his arm ripped off by the giant killer rabbit?" and any of your friends who're following you can spit back "DeForest Kelley in Night of the Lepus", so you get your answer without having to send out an email. IMHO, the really interesting thing about it, I suppose, is that if you sign up to watch Barak Obama's Twitter feed, a bot signs up to follow your feed, and he's the only Presidential candidate who does this. Presumably, this means that there's some kind of sorting system, wherein they spit out common topics so that someone at the Obama campaign has an idea of what people are Twittering about.
Reminds me of the kids who climbed onto the hayride last halloween with my family and sat there heads down through the whole thing, texting on their phones. There were two other teens, not part of that group, cuddled up in one corner of the wagon, necking a bit when they thought nobody was looking. I nudged my kids and told 'em that those two were doing it right, and the other kids were all idiots. More and more I'm convinced these devices just become our electronic dog collars.
