Tech Stream

Twitter for breakfast

9 April 2009

Listen and download: MP3

I’ve found myself becoming a reluctant evangelist for Twitter in the past couple of weeks, and I’m not the only one.  Many people in the media, marketing and technology industry seem to be in the same boat.  This will change, and in fact it already is as more people start using the service.  But being able to clearly define what makes it such an interesting and effective communication and networking tool is still a little hard to do.   New Matilda, the Australian social commentary website, attempted to pinpoint why Twitter has taken off in an article yesterday, and spoke with dot-com veteran and technology writer Stilgherrian about it:

“Look at one person’s Twitter stream and you’re seeing just one half of a dynamic conversation, and a tiny fraction of what makes the site useful. It’s like at the end of the week someone has sent you a transcript of one person’s contributions to water cooler conversations at your work. But look at specific moments, and you see discoveries, solutions for problems, social connections.”

The full article is a good read, but there are any number of similar articles online.  My advice is to jump in at the deep end and try it for yourself. And a lot of radio and TV programs and presenters on the ABC are now twittering madly or using Twitter Search tools to keep on top of citizen-journo news reporting, trends and general news. The Tech Stream even has a twitter feed – http://twitter.com/tech_stream – although for some reason my updates aren’t appearing! Grr.

Anyway, on Wednesday I had breakfast (banana bread with vanilla yoghurt!) with Simon Goodrich, General Manager of Portable Content and president of the Victorian chapter of the Australian Interactive Media Industry Association.  We got talking about Twitter, as you do, and you can listen to our chat via the MP3 link at the top of this story. We talked about its rapid growth and the viability of its business model. We also spoke about similar services in Asia and the future of sites like Facebook as well.

I’d be interested on your thoughts about trends in lifestreaming and web2.0 social networking services – which ones do you use, have you abandoned some to join others, does twitter annoy or confuse you, are you an evangelist for its service or can you recommend some tools or other websites that aggregate or use its content in interesting ways? Feel free to leave a comment below.