Following some debates on my course at the University of Sheffield, I thought I'd write a brief defence of Twitter.
From Peter Cole to Ed Roussel (his Twitter feed is here) and of course everyone on the course, it's been a few days of debate about Twitter.
Firstly, it's not simply for telling people what you are doing 24/7, everyday. In the case of Stephen Fry, public figure and national treasure that he is (and one of the foremost technology reviewers in the country), thousands - 177,371 in fact - want to know what he is doing. But for most people, in most situations, it isn't the case. For me, it exists for 3 reasons:
Breaking news
BreakingNewsOn is one of the more popular Twitter feeds, with nearly 25,000 followers. It offers, in effect, a breaking news wire and it will soon establish a full news feed. I have seen stories appear there before they do on CNN or BBC: the Hudson river crash and the Mumbai attacks included. I've never seen them subsequently have to retract a story.
In addition, members of the public can tweet on news events - plane crashes, the Hudson river crash, even the snow in the UK. For journalists and news organisations, this is a good way of seeing how the public are reacting to an event, either over time or as it happens. The ability to post pictures also adds to this (first picture of the Hudson river crash), as does the easy ability to update Twitter from your phone simply by SMS.
Linking
Using tinyurl, which shortens any url, Twitter can be used to link to blogs, news items, photos - any website in effect. This allows it to act like a blog or web-page linking to other websites, be it through self-promotion or admiration and interest in others work.
Conversation
Twitter is not there to replace Facebook, MSN (if anyone uses that now) or live online chats. What it allows is a simple, uniform platform where it is possible to respond, promote (or 'retweet') to others. It's not just for normal individuals either. Pressure groups (the NUS) think tanks, student unions, politicians, world famous authors like Paulo Coelho, even the University of Sheffield law department all have Twitter feeds.
The downsides
As pointed out to me by Ben Hazell of the Telegraph earlier today, Twitter is far from perfect. Many of the applications, such as searching what people are tweeting about, are provided by third parties. It has had bug problems. And, indeed, it is almost impossible to make money out of the service.
Twitter should be seen not as something that is replacing journalists or media organisations, but as a tool, like Google, they can exploit to attract new users, to network and to find out more analysis and news - you choose what you want to here about.
And just so you know, you can find me on Twitter here.
I'll be writing a fuller post about convergence week later. You can see Helia's, Rich's and Jasmine's comments on the week on their blogs.
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2 comments:
Peter Cole has a twitter fixation I think.
Quite apart from the points you made, it seems to me that as journalism students we need to be embracing new stuff like twitter.
Jobs aren't easy to come by at the moment. Twitter doesn't take up much time or effort and for me, it is certainly an experimental process. Maybe it will prove useful, maybe not.
I was surprised how few people in the department use Twitter. Journalism's future seems so uncertain at the moment that surely students going into the profession should be exploring every new method and resource available.
I believe I'm in the same group as you for the convergence project. It'll be interesting to see how it all turns out, I think a fair few people are reluctant to converge.
Twitter seems very faddish. There's a desperation amongst media companies to be 'multi-platform' and things like Twitter feed right into it.
Will people be desperate for 140 character updates on the world in three years time? I'm doubtful.
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