coding for food

So, if you have been living under a rock for the past few months, you've never heard of Twitter. Twitter has been growing at a increasing rate ever since the election when the inter-webs were flooded by twitter posts about the elections results. Now regards of if you don't know what Twitter is or not, you're probably asking your self - Why would I want to use it? Oh where do I begin... All great stories start at the beginning, so if your not new to Twitter, bare with me on this part. Twitter is basically a micro-blogging platform which is different than Wordpress or Blogspot because it limits your posts to 140 characters. In other words - Twitter is a social network similar to Facebook Status Messages without the profiles and are more public. Twitter begs you ask the simple question - "What are you doing?". Users who use Twitter can post an update saying that they just found a great coffee at a local shop or they found a pair of jeans that they liked in their size at the mall. The options are limitless, and basically Twitter can form a network of people that like certain things. Twitter fills in the gaps where emails and cell phones leave out. For example, you don't want to call you friend and tell them you just had a cup of coffee - its just not practical. You also wouldn't email someone to tell them you went to the park today - again not practical. Twitter makes it practical by giving the ability to post short blobs about our everyday activity. It doesn't require you write a novel on what you did, but condenses it to make it short and sweet for the world to see. Soon you'll be finding people that share the same interests as you and you'll build your social and your professional network. Look - social networks are here to stay - a great example of this is LinkedIn, which is the largest professional social network in the US right now. Some companies actually encourage you get sign up and sooner or later it will be a requirement. Now, I hear you already, you observant reader - "But I don't want people to know about my life 24/7, Twitter is very stalkerish!". I completely understand your point. Twitter can be deemed to most as a "stalker" tool inviting strangers to follower your updates that you have little or no connection with. For example, currently as of today (3/19), I have 44 followers on on my Twitter page, I probably know about 40% in real life.  To many that may seem like a invasion of privacy, but its actually the opposite. Twitter uses the status message of connecting us with people who share common interests. It makes the world transparent and brings us closer together as a community. Like it or not - we share a connection with everyone in the world - we are all human. That characteristic brings is together whether you like or not. So to bring all these thoughts back to the main subject of this post - I use Twitter to connect with the world. With Twitter, I am able to find out interesting websites, tech news, and most important people. The greatest asset to Twitter is not just the content, is the people that use it. Without their personality Twitter would just be another Facebook without the profiles. So why should you use it? Because, face it, your already interested. You keep you telling yourself and others that your not going to join because you have your Facebook and your MySpace, why do you need Twitter? Because Twitter is better than those other social network, because it doesn't require you to create over lavish MySpace profile pages, and enter in tons of personal data to Facebook - it just connects you with others based on what you input into it. Twitter's Search page is one of the best things about Twitter, because it shows you what people are talking about at all times of the day. When the iPhone 3.0 preview was unveiled, tons of Twitters joined in the conversation and you got a first hand look on how humans respond to certain situations.

So in closing, why should you use Twitter? Because it's your newspaper/word-of-mouth combintation of the 21st century. Plus, you can follow updates from Shaq. Who wouldn't want that?

Update: 3/19 - Yes, I really do need to proof read my blog posts. Thanks, Vinny