Some Netfolks are wildly atwittter over Twitter, a new social networking tool that lets you broadcast messages by phone or IM—just the ticket for telling your friends what you’re up to at the moment. Andy Carvin, a major K-12 blogger, is excited about Twitter for serious purposes.
I myself can see Twitter as a way to share enthusiasm for various books, and in fact, if it’s here to stay, I wouldn’t be surprised to see e-book software integrated with the service, as well as growing library adoption (drop by another David Rothman’s blog for more on the library angle).
The downside
But will Twitter get out of hand? Is this one more enemy of concentration for those who would rather just read books or write them without interruptions? Do we really want to spend extra minutes each day to update our status? In some ways could this really be just a real-time executive calendar program in disguise? Another way to take the fun out of life, in some cases?
A John Edwards angle, even: Nope, I haven’t forgotten about the review of Elizabeth Edwards’ book from Net and copyright perspectives. Meanwhile, not content to do the Web, podcast and Second Life acts, Edwards partisans are Twittering, as I discovered in dropping by Twitter.com. If other pols aren’t Twittering already, you can bet they will shortly.
Thought: Will Twitter users eventually charge advertisers for access? Or will free PCs come with Twitter reception mandated? Talk about hell for users.
Related: The Several Habits of Wildly Successful Twitter Users in Slacker Manager, which, reassuringly, also has a book-related post. Also see Twitter coverage via Google News, including information out of SXSW, where the service is among the finalists for a Web award.
Image credit: SGD–using Creative Commons license.
twitter is very popular at the sxsw conference. frankly, its appeal is beyond me.
I think the main effect that Twitter will have on e-books is that inevitably someone will create a “e-books for download on Rapidshare” account/group.
I update my Twitter feed about 30 times a day. It really isn’t much of an attention hog since the web site is so light..just type in a few words and hit submit and that’s it. Certainly it’s a lot lighter than most applications designed to let users track what they’re doing at any given moment (and I do use Twitter explicitly for time tracking rather any any of the social network-y stuff).
I think the bigger question is what the business model is for Twitter (which I assume is being bought out by Yahoo! or Google). Advertising would pretty much ruin the experience, and I can’t imagine anyone would pay to Twitter.
Have you seen Swotter? http://booktwo.org/swotter
Swotter reads books over Twitter…
Update: Robert Nagle is reading teleread.
Update 2:Robert Nagle is taking a bathroom break.
Update 3: Robert Nagle is deciding what color socks to wear.
Update 4: Robert Nagle is seeing how much money he has in his pocket.
Now imagine reading these things 15 hours a day from a friends list of 40! Oh, the tedium.
I view this as a logical extension of IM and social networking. I for one can’t imagine my friends would be interested in what I’m doing. But it is a convenience nonetheless if you regularly IM. I think facebook had a status notification feature that they eventually had to discontinue.
In events like a conference, twitter is an extremely useful tool, though we have a bigscreen tv in the hallway with random twitter messages;ie, “Dan Rather’s speech is f&$&#$ing boring.”
Funny, Robert. How about this?
Update 1: Joe Schmo has just filed for bankruptcy.
Update 2: Police have charged him with wife-beating.
Update 3: This may be Joe’s last update as he can longer afford to pay the utility bills.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, I can envision a lot of fiction in the positive posts.
David