Twitter Beginning To Define Itself

The social networking site Twitter seemed innocuous even irrelevant when I first went there. What grabbed me was the idea of a Timeline.

(click to see Twitter Timeline, a complimentary application written by Andy James Davies.)

One of the qualities of the web 2.0 world is the multi-dimensionality of it. Unlike tv - which set the time and date - requiring you had to make it home in time to watch your show - the pc in web 2.0 gives you the ability to choose not just when and where to watch, but also record, edit, create, download, upload, post, or delete!

Now along comes twitter with a real time network that has, due to each entry's brevity, an historical dimension as well. It's not just 'What are you doing?', but by scrolling back you can easily see the forth dimension as well, time. What WERE you doing, who were you following, who did you stop following, and what were the ones you follow doing when you were doing?

Alexa Traffic Stats - Daily Reach for Twitter, Blogger, and Facebook over one year.

A Tweeter shitmydadsays is one of Twitter's exploding (see graph) address's with 347,276 Followers. His bio says it all:

"I'm 29. I live with my 73-year-old dad. He is awesome. I just write down shit that he says."

Funny as hell.

I'm using Twitter to tell people what I've just posted on FilterBlogs (my Blogger account), Twitter then automatically posts to my Facebook 'Wall' - thus informing both my friends (who love me) on Facebook and my 'Followers' who found me through Subject, on Twitter.

In the future I see a new social networking site that includes all the bells and widgets from all these sites (+Youtube) in one. It could be a further developed Facebook - as it has open code - but Facebook still lacks a lot of the widgets in Blogger that I find really useful. Facebook also seems to have core software problems, it is almost as slow as many Microsoft applications, indicating to me it will have to be re-written from the bottom up at some point.

Twitter is becoming a regular 'came from' entry in my blogs STATCOUNTER widget, an application that lets me know how many visitors have been to my site, and where they came from. It helps me learn how to optimize my wording for search engine hits and to see what topics my readers are interested in. The combination of Twitter and Facebook are bringing more readers.

(You can view Twitters effect on FilterBlogs by clicking on the StatCounter icon in the sidebar. ---->)



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