Monday, 17 October 2011

Twitter- Your mini diary.

Look back to the title, it's not very hard to understand how eventually Twitter changed our way to express our self. We used to write diary on the book (If you had this habit and you still remember). But with the dot com burst, everything change. Books are needed no more. Everything is in the 2D screen format. You can get whatever you want and most importantly, is the way you express yourself to the world through Internet. From Frienster, Blogger, Facebook and Twitter. They had the common characteristic: Freedom of Speech, private space and also the mobility to access to the website.

Let me introduce Twitter, the latest social networking sites. It works within 140 characters. The term "Tweets" refers to the sentences that you post to the Twitter. Also, Twittter had the features of harsh tag which is "#". This is the interesting part which had maintain the numbers of users in Twitter ad even increasing. This is how harsh tag works, with the harsh tag, you can eventually see every tweets of different users from all around the world regarding to the same topic. Let's take #MondayBlue as example, when you go through the #MondayBlue harsh tag you can see the users had the common topic and it's happening in anytime.


The pictures above are the print screen of the Twitter harsh tag. It showed that every one were updating their tweets with the same harsh tag and it's keep updating with every minutes. In my point of view, harsh tag actually had the advantages of building the common bond within the Twitter users. It's like a starting topic for a conversation between the users. More than that, there is a features named "Follower", which is your friends follow your Tweets which is similar with the features in Facebook called "Friends".

Besides that, Twitter also allowed users shared the link which had showed in the pictures above. It involved the link sharing and also the @user name which is similar with the Facebook "tag". It's very convenient and it's update so frequently.

Twitter basically can be categorized in 4 ways which are:

(a) News & Opinions 

Much of people still rely on the newspaper no matter is in paper or digital form. But now there are also another ways to get the latest news without going through the bunch of words in the newspaper which is using Twitter to summarize the news in 140 characters and also some links-sharing which can give you a more customized and also more segmented news.

(b) Searching

As the search engine had evolved so fast which had become parts of our life. Twitter had eventually helped us in expanding the search engine searching. We no need to worry on how and what we going to search in the search engine but can get the information by the link sharing on the Twitter which is directly go to the sources. It saves time and also you can find more diverse information from other users.

(c) Advertising

This plays important in every people. People may advertise themselves to get more followers and popular, people may advertise themselves such as blog to earn some income, well, advertising is important not only for personal but also for the business. People can expand their business by advertising through Twitter with the latest deal or promotions, or even to create awareness as social networking sites are always timely. People can always update what's the latest news and others followers can get to know it in first-hand. For example, McDonald, when they update with the new menu promotion in the Twitter, the follower can eventually get the promotion in the first hand. What's more is that when the numbers of followers getting increase, the more message will passed through everyone in the Twitter.


(d) End user Innovation

No doubt that the Internet had eventually brought the invention of the social networking sites and also a new platform for people to interact and express themselves. It's basically pro-user based. People creates their content such as story sharing, link sharing, what's happening in your daily life.......just with the 140 characters.

It's hard to believe that we are no needed our small little book to records down what happening and feeling in our self. We now tend to open up to the world about what we are thinking right now, what we just had done, and what we going to do. It's like exposed to the outer about our self. This is a great things but come to think of it, when the more you exposed yourself to the outer world, did you notice that someone that you don't even know who is she/he are stalking or observing you and you are give them the chance to know more about you. That's the privacy problem that we should be aware in the cyber world. You should notice, and so do we.

2 comments:

  1. yup, totally agree with you.
    People crazy on tweet, but they didn't who behind watching you, been stalking. Most of the people didn't aware of privacy, they tell the world what their doing, with someone in a particular place, we will never who will be they looking for our tweet, it's quit dangerous as we don't know who going to harm us.

    For instance, our lecture might stalking us as well, how if a person talking something bad about the lecture? or if a person absent today, but he/she twitter he now on somewhere doing something, make sense? it's funny right, you telling lecture you are sick, but your tweet is going somewhere to enjoy at the same day same time. This will actually spoil your own reputation and lost the trust from the lecturer toward you right? D:

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  2. Yup! The advantage of social networking sites to us is a platform for us to exchange our thoughts. But people sometimes misuse it. Everything had to be very careful when using adapt to this new trend.

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