Twitter

Today in class we discussed blogging and twitter. For the longest time, I thought that twitter was ridiculous. Who cares what you ate for breakfast, that you took your dog for a walk, and that you can't stand your in laws? I would make fun of any my friends when they would pull out their phones to "tweet". However, as more and more people started using it, I became interested in what exactly it was. Was it really just for people who feels like the world wants to know their every move? Or could it be a new, innovative way of quickly transferring information to a widespread audience?

About a year ago, I started my first twitter account. I'm sure I put an obnoxious tweet that said something along the lines of "no idea what this is, here's to hoping!". Quickly I became quite addicted. At first I just followed some of my friends, and found out way too much information about them. Soon after, I'll admit, I even started following some celebrities. Their tweets got old after awhile, and the thrill started to die out. I stopped signing into my twitter account and it was soon covered in cobwebs. However, a few months ago, when I really started getting into blogging, I started following some of the writers of my favorite blogs. From there, I realized that twitter was a great place to find out the latest news, new products and inventions that have been released, and more. I find myself checking twitter several times a day and getting a live feed to my phone. It seems as if Twitter has blown up in regards to how many people use it over the past 6 months. There's no doubt in my mind that as soon as something big happens in the world, if I'm following the right sources, I will be one of the first to find out about it. 

While I'll admit that most of my tweets have no real information, I am working towards utilizing twitter to the most of its capabilities. It's an excellent resource for information and for getting traffic to a blog or webpage. Twitter is definitely a "microblogging" tool, and it will be interesting to see what the future holds for this simple, but powerful, tool for journalism.