Microblogging with Twitter Thing 12

Today I looked at all the fuzz around Twitter. I first viewed the videos to get a structured introduction to Twitter. I then read the various articles with praise and critic against Twitter.

I went to Twitter search page as point of entry. Doing single word searches: “Eindhoven; Wageningen; Sinterklaas”. Following the links to Tweets(messages) about the subject. There I followed links to “Followers” and “Following” and “Listed”.

Most of the users that I have visited also provide links to their blogs.

I also did an advanced search, searching for specific people, famous and friends. Mostly found references to them and not their own messages.

I noticed a lot of messages with Url’s (tinyurl’s). These url’s linked to news articles. Several url’s also linked to blogs and personal websites.

After about fifteen minutes I experienced the first breakdown in service. Twitter not available for “Maintenance purposes”. That reminded me of the hacker episode of a few months back when several social networks were offline for a few days.

The library of the Vredespaleis in The Hague uses Twitter with enthusiasm to promote their services and collection. Many libraries use automatic RSS feeds results as Twitter messages. Clearly sending out a message from an “Institution”, while most of the other Twitter users are individual users.

They say that the power of Twitter is found in the Interaction part.

Today I just observed and didn’t reply to any messages. I didn’t leave any messages either. So obviously I didn’t get any feedback.

Personally I am not convinced of the additional value of Twitter yet. Especially when one have subscribed to RSS feeds and have access to Wiki sites. But I will follow discussions on this topic. I might be convinced at a later stage?