I got banned?

[Zavon]

Yeah, I still dont even understand what twitter is exactly. The concept and appeal... There is something that I'm just not grasping

[Wulf]

Yeah, I still dont even understand what twitter is exactly. The concept and appeal... There is something that I'm just not grasping

Same

[Sillywilly]

Twitter sucks ballz. I have no idea why the hell twitter is considered an effective media outlet.

[Draconian]

Oh man, haha we are either all ahead of the curve on what a good idea is, or totally beginning our decline into "What's all this new fangled stuff good for anyway?" territory as said on page 1. How scary is that thought?

It pleases me that so many of you feel the same about Twitter... but I can't say I'm not a bit worried about that fact, too!

[Valec]

Oh man, haha we are either all ahead of the curve on what a good idea is, or totally beginning our decline into "What's all this new fangled stuff good for anyway?" territory as said on page 1. How scary is that thought?

It pleases me that so many of you feel the same about Twitter... but I can't say I'm not a bit worried about that fact, too!

As far as I can tell, Twitter is a less feature-rich Facebook(this is probably it's appeal). It's not really anything that complicated as far as I can tell, but my contact with it is pretty limited.

[wowzer]

You have to look at twitter from 2 perspectives to really understand it.

1. The average joe - Makes a twitter account, gets his friends to follow him, then posts stupid shit that no one cares about. He follows his friends, and his favorite celebrities, and his favorite companies. Swag swag YOLO etc.

2. Corporations/celebrities - Set up a profile, hire someone to post witty remarks and news about your company. Invite millions of people to follow you. Now you have a group of people that you can advertise to for free, all of which have some interest in what you have to say. Each tweet always reaches their target demographic, and has the potential to be retweeted, which exponentially expands the number of people exposed to whatever they have to say.

For the average person without a business to promote, you are pretty much creating an account to have people advertise to you. Whether it is companies peddling goods and services, or your friends advertising their shallow and meaningless lives. For a business, it's hard to find a flaw in using it to advertise/release news.

Oh and btw, hello again Catacombs crew. Thought I'd check in with the forums now that GW2 has been released. I'm refusing to buy a mmo until I graduate, or else it's never gonna happen.

[Graveworm]

I use twitter exclusively to follow people. It's great for keeping up on the communities I am interested in (the Magic: the Gathering community and the fighting game community) and a hodgepodge of game-related stuff (e.g. Trent Oster, who tweets about Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition a lot). If you aren't using Twitter you are missing out on an amazing information feed. You don't have to tweet anything, and you don't have to follow anyone who posts dumb shit.

[VKhaun]

Twitter is the natural next step for social media.

Text messaging caught on for lots of reasons, the blogging trend made it socially acceptable to talk about yourself to strangers for no reason even though that would make you REALLY CREEPY in the grocery store, and forums have always been a good way to hold a discussion that people liked when they were at a desktop. You can't be interrupted and you can include links and pictures since the audience was also at a PC with the internet.

As phones got more powerful and started doing web browsing and multimedia, twitter filled the niche as a hybrid of text messaging and forums. With hosting like tinyurl and tinypic it's easy to have text messaging with the organization and extras of a forum.

Think of your primary twitter feed as the 'new posts' button on a forum, and viewing conversations/retweets etc. as clicking threads... in text messaging. An unasnwered tweet is no different than a frivolous post.