Twitter: Why?

Twitter has become the latest mega-buzz Web site -- The New York Times ran a major piece about it over the weekend. Here is a bit of a different take on Twitter from our DFNG correspondent Nicole Norfleet of the University of North Carolina.

By Nicole:

As if there are not enough outlets already for broadcasting your personal information to the world, now you can Twitter.

People around the world are updating their friends and curious followers about their lives - in 140 words or less - by posting on Twitter.com. The point of Twitter is to ask users "What are you doing?" but based on the astounding revelations from Twitterers that I have had the chance to read it seems they are eating, napping and just doing a whole lotta of nothing.

After telling one of my friends about Twitter he thought it was cute to write on my recently-created page, "Nicole is wondering why someone invented this, and furthermore, why anyone actually uses it. I mean, seriously. No one cares." While his comment may seem kinda immature after I thought about it - seriously, does anybody really care?

Apparently, some people do. They log on and post and check their friends or complete strangers' updates. Some critics probably thought nobody would care about other people's relationship status or favorite movie or if they changed their haircuts, but BOOM then came Facebook.com with its 47,000 networks and 30 billion page views a month.

If this micro-blogging technology is suppose to be the future MySpace for trendy youth then it needs to find its niche in the social-networking sphere. If I want to contact my friends I have an instant messenger account. If I want to update people on what I am doing or feeling there is now the "My status" feature on Facebook. If I want to be creative there is MySpace or Blogger.com or heck even Second Life.

I don't know anyone who uses it and when I tell people what it is they don't consider it relevant enough to use. While, I refuse to jump on the media bandwagon and fall victim to "the lure of Twitter," other users will attest that this latest Web 2.0 application just needs some time to catch on. Maybe it does. Until then I guess I'll just stick to writing useless Away Messages.