| Mobile technology and social networking tools are bringing about changes in many aspects of the nine-to-five world, but their effects have been creeping into after-hours activities as well. The explosive growth of Facebook, now the second-most visited website in North America, has seen millions using their personal profile pages as de facto social calendars and mobile technology is helping to overcome early limitations such as the need to be tied to a computer.
One of the latest Internet offspring making waves in this area is Twitter, originally described as a micro-blogging application aimed at a select audience of your closest friends. Twitter allows a short, 140-character post on only one topic: What are you doing right now? Unlike a typical blog where your last post remains public for as long as you want, on the Twitter.com public website, only the last 15 posts are present, leaving the shelf life of the average Twitter message to eke in at just under four minutes. What sort of posts make up these bloglets? "Just came back from the Starbucks." "Getting ready for work." "Standing in line at the express checkout counter." "Twittering when I should be studying." Many early critics of Twitter complained of its high signal-to-noise ratio (meaningful versus meaningless content). The strength of Twitter, however, is that people can sign up to send and receive posts via their cellphones, as well as subscribing to postings from specific users, thereby cutting out much of the noise and transforming Twitter into a text message e-mail list. Major news outlets like the BBC and CNN use Twitter to announce upcoming stories.
At March’s South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive Conference, the technology innovation side of the more famous music festival, conference goers used it to plan spontaneous after-session parties. As a mobile social networking tool, Twitter excelled at short-term organizing. It was again used to arrange after-hours events at San Francisco’s Web 2.0 conference in April, to much acclaim. The number of registered Twitter users has doubled to over 100,000 though only a fifth appear to be posting with regularity. Twitter also got a very public hand from Hollywood as the director of the ill-fated TV series Drive used it to offer live commentary during the show’s première.
However, Twitter gained an even larger profile when it was invited to be one of the outside applications utilized on Facebook, the social networking platform that is adding thousands of new users every day. While Facebook users have the ability to notify their friends using its "status" function, sending out little bloglets of their own, Twitter has nevertheless struck a chord, primarily because accessing it via a cellphone is much easier and cheaper than doing so using Facebook. People are using Facebook to plan events, using the "wall-to-wall" and "group" functions to set everything up. Once the wheels are set in motion, however, things turn to Twitter, much like at SXSW, where the little applet proved to be much more adept at handling changes of plans and impromptu decisions. |
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