Twitter again

(By Richard Holway 6.00pm Sunday 23rd Aug 09) My comments on Twitter last week (see Twitter’s ‘Pointless Babble’ and Twitter debate revisited) continue to provoke comment. I was taken to task by my friend Alex van Someren (the founder of nCipher) who wrote

Richard

You are still missing the point about Twitter. Of course there is a lot of fatuous stuff of no interest to anybody except the originating narcissist. However, it works very well for several novel things:

- crowdsourcing answers to questions, e.g. "My iPhone just did this: has that happened to anyone else?"

- the dissemination of items of interest on the Internet, e.g. news bulletins, product status updates, press release headlines

- most of all: for forwarding URL links to new Web content

Twitter is an opt-in "narrowcasting" medium. Like any medium it can be abused, but don't shoot the messenger and make the mistake of believing that every message is therefore worthless - you might miss something important.

Alex.