Hello,
I'm Mervi Eskelinen!
An artist, nerd and sorcerer, dedicated to make world softer and better for everyone, and to get you to make more art. Make art, change the world!
About: Twitter
Twitter is probably one of the first examples to come in mind when talking about social media or social networking. Usually Twitter is described as a microblogging service which allows the users to send and read messages, called tweets. In the following I will take a brief look on what Twitter is and how it can be used.
The basic idea of Twitter is allowing users to send and read short, 140 characters long messages telling what they are up to or sharing their ideas. Formerly Twitter asked it’s users to answer the question “What are you doing?”, but just last year the question was changed to “What’s happening?” which tells about the changes in how the service is being used. Earlier users sent mainly trivial messages such as “having a dinner”, but nowadays tweets often include more information, links and even photos.
Each registered user has their own timeline where their tweets are shown. They also can follow other users’ tweets, which are then added to their timeline to be read. A user can also protect their tweets, so that only the users they approve can follow and read them. Many of the Twitter users seem to be more attracted in gathering loads of followers than tweeting about things that interest themselves. Spammers have obviously entered Twitter and the service is having a continuous fight against spam accounts.
During past couple of years the amount of Twitter users has grown fast and the service has been adapted to marketing and even customer service. Many companies and organizations have been quite slow in adapting social media and therefore slow adapting Twitter. More and more celebrities, such as actors and musicians have roamed in Twitter and they tend to get lots of followers pretty fast. Some of the Twitter users (especially early adapters) are not very happy with this. One of the problems this creates is that Twitter seems to be keen to change the service to benefit the celebrities rather than the “common” users.
Twitter can be used through the official site but also through third party sites, services and apps. For instance there’s a wide selection of iPhone apps for reading and sending tweets. The applications and services offer different ways to use Twitter, but their basic usage is usually the same. Basic usage covers usually normal text tweets, posting links, communicating with other users (this includes replies and mentions), reposting tweets (called retweeting) and posting photos through other services. The more advanced usage often means games or some sort of an automatic or half-automatic technical solution.
For an imaginative user Twitter offers lots of interesting possibilities. Novelist could use it to write a story, 140 characters at time. It can be used in communicating with customers and other interest groups. A company can utilize the service and it’s users to help with development of a product. Twitter itself is pretty simple service, but that is why it gives so many opportunities in adapting it to different sorts of applications.
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