So, before yesterday, I’d never heard of Twitter…I had to learn about it from an NPR podcast I listened to… It’s apparently a new social networking phenomenon (a la Facebook or MySpace…) that tells the world what you’re doing at any given time. You can post, IM or use a cell phone with text messaging to post a short blurb giving everyone an update, and then you can subscribe to these updates by various means… For example, I could subscribe to your Twitter account and anytime you’d update it, my cell phone would vibrate and I’d receive a text message letting me know what’s up. You can write any message you want, from “looking at websites” to “eating a ham sandwich”…
According to the Wikipedia article, Twitter has been around since October of 2006… NPR and the New York Times, amongst others, have done articles about it… Hundreds of thousands of people all over the world use it, apparently…and this leads me to my point:
Why did it take until May for me to hear about it?
I guess it means I’ve reached something of a turning point… Up until now, I’ve kept up with technology and websites relatively well – Truman students knew about Facebook before it was even available for them to join, and well before news organizations jumped on it as a “phenomenon”… And I keep up with geeky things like that pretty regularly looking at sites like Slashdot and Engadget… So do we all eventually reach a point when our knowledge of the world becomes antiquated? You hear stories from parents beginning with “when I was your age…” all the time, and at some point, all of our parents probably realized that they were knowing less and less about the generation(s) that were coming after them… My generation is just barely involved in the whole “social networking” thing, but the high school students at church are all over MySpace – I simply have no interest in it. Back in college, I’d hear about stuff from friends in classes and new sites to visit, but we don’t really talk about such things in grad school…I’d assume that “real world jobs” would be similar…
I guess I just wasn’t planning on hitting this realization just before turning 25… I figured it’d happen after I had kids, and after they got a bit older and started getting into their own interests… I wasn’t thinking that I’d reach a point where I can visually see the generation just behind mine gradually distancing itself from mine…if only in this one sector of our lives…
I’m sure I’m just over-reacting, but with the world moving faster and faster and more information becoming available over the internet, it makes you wonder if the number of years between each generational shift is decreasing… For example, I’ve never thought that my sister and I (separated by 3 years) were in different generations, but maybe we are…
Has anyone else heard of or used Twitter, or is it just me?
I’ve heard of twitter, but not used it, ’cause I don’t have a cell phone, and I don’t honestly care about staying up to date with people I know every hour of every day.
Most of what I’ve read about twitter was their scalability problems with Ruby on Rails. Like most social networking sites, I predict Twitter will be popular for a year or two, then people will migrate to the next big thing.
You only list engadget and slashdot as sources, but they are definitely part of the reason you’re out of the loop (full disclosure: I skim both fairly regularly). Engagdet is great if you care about cell phones and other crap you can’t buy in the states, and slashdot is great for crappy comentary on sensationalist, incorrect articles, or news items that are several days old and also usually wrong. Most news sites are behind the curve. Answer? Blogosphere! (I hate that word)
Get yourself a news reader and start subscribing to famous nerdy peoples’ blogs. I can post/send you my list of 100+ blogs I read every day, but I suspect the signal / noise ratio for you will be much lower than it is for me (obviously, as we are not the same person). Even non-techy related blogs I read (most relating to food and death metal) have mentioned twitter, fwiw.
now you know why I could care less about text messaging and other such things. I just don’t care…
so I’m 100% sure that I’m classified in this other generation you speak of and I have personally never heard of Twitter. And to my mother’s comment about text messaging, you won’t get it if you’re not in my generation.
Yes, Rachel, you’re in “the other generation”…perhaps even two or three generations behind us, sadly… Of course, honestly, I don’t really understand text messaging either, unless you have a QWERTY keyboard available… No one should have to hit the “1” button three times to get a “C” typed out…
And yeah, Stu, I’ll take some other nerdy blogs… Those were two that I go to frequently, but the others I hit are linked off my own blog…Ars, FlexBeta and Newsforge, of course, hit some of these things…but obviously not all…
For what its worth, on a lot of modern phones, you no longer have to hit “1” three times for “C”. Instead, you hit the buttons with your letters, and the phone guesses the words you are typing. This works surprisingly well on the razr, once you get used to it.
I feel tech savvy just because I can post comments on my son’s blog! Gotta count for something!
i have not heard of any such thing until the very moment i read this blog entry.
…you old fart.
I’ve known about Twitter for a while, although I still have yet to understand the value of it. I think the reason the reason I knew what Twitter was before most people is because I do exactly what someone had mentioned in a previous comment: I subscribe to the RSS feeds of nerds — web professionals, specifically. Within that community people seem to be going crazy for it at the moment.
Oh, and about MySpace: it was around in our time, I think we were just smart enough to recognize it for the steaming pile of crap that it is. It still holds a special place on my “Worst Designed Websites” list.
I’ve never heard of it either.