Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Twitter explained. A white paper to download

If you need to get up to speed on the phenomenon that is twitter, there are of course a few posts on fasterfuture which have a stab at explaining its power and value.
But for one hit, and one you could share to bring others up to speed relatively succinctly; try Luke Weaver's (@weaverluke's) downloadable paper.
It must be good; he's quoted me! (ah hem...)
"Twitter's value is in keeping the conversation open, visible, synchronous and consistent.”
Excerpt:
It is kind of weird, even in terms of a Facebooked contemporary culture, to hang out in a virtual space exchanging 140-character messages.
The whole notion of privacy, a concept that is, after all only as old as the City, seems to be shifting and morphing with great rapidity (at least in the developed, hyper-networked world).

Who knows if Twitter will prove to be a decisive driver and/or beneficiary of social change, or a flash in the pan that attracts a few million wild-eyed wannabe visionaries before collapsing under its own selfreferential weight?

My own twitter-in-a-nutshell? Distributed microblogging for adhoc fuzzy-edged communities of purpose. Yeah, I know. Too brief. Read Luke's paper then.

Bonus link: via gregory lent: The Wisdom Project. Give it some of your time.

1 comment:

  1. Interested in your thoughts on this one too David
    (http://viewfromthecoalface.blogspot.com/2008/10/twitter-again-at-crossroads.html)

    ReplyDelete

FasterFuture.blogspot.com

The rate of change is so rapid it's difficult for one person to keep up to speed. Let's pool our thoughts, share our reactions and, who knows, even reach some shared conclusions worth arriving at?