Twitter

Twitter seems to be the latest fad, newest rage, or most up to date touchstone of your technological expertise.  It’s essentially a microblogging service where you leave messages of 140 characters or less to followers.  You also follow others, and people can search and see what everyone is tweeting about as long as it’s not a direct message to another user.  But for all I’ve researched, I can’t find a single person that has given a clear example of how this is anything more than another timedrain.

I dabble in a lot of technology under the premise that I’d like to see how I could use it in the classroom, but I really doubt I could or would use Twitter.  For the past few months I followed a few teachers, websites, and celebrities and infrequently tweeted what I was doing.    When I had questions about how to use diigo, I tweeted my questions and someone from the diigo website tweeted back with links and information to help me.  When I had problems creating my family tree at Geni, someone from Geni tweeted back.  That was pretty useful, however, most of the time I’m skimming over messages about what people are eating and making sure I don’t read spoilers for the latest episode of Biggest Loser before I have a chance to watch it.

I’m following Imogen Heap and it’s a bizarre experience.  I now know that she recently almost ate a caterpillar in some meal, and it is quite fascinating to know about a celebrity’s life in that kind of detail, but I don’t really need to.    If I scare myself and measure out the number of days, hours, and minutes left in my life and then think of how much time I have left to accomplish my goals, why waste time reading nonsensical tweets?

I admit it was very useful when Diigo and Geni responded to my tweets, but I could have just searched their forums or taken a few more seconds to learn their websites.  I definitely don’t need Twitter for that, and I’d welcome anyone who could argue for a use of Twitter that isn’t 95% finding out what other users are eating for dinner that night.