CS: What the heck is Twitter, and why would I want to use it?

[fenrisfox]

[This is a rare public entry.]

Many people I know seem to be curious about what exactly Twitter is, and why they might want to use it. That's not easy to do; I myself was skeptical of the medium (I tend to resist popular trends, at least temporarily), until I gave in and tried it.

I will, however, give explaining it a try.

Comments

[fenrisfox]

To each their own. =:o) ~ scritches catboy ears gently ~

[lupine52]

tweets sound like a fantastic way for people to give researchers, fad clothing designers, and research groups free information. I think I will pass.

[fenrisfox]

If you're concerned about researchers, robots, etc. crawling and mining your timeline, you can - much like LJ - lock (protect in their lingo) your timeline. You can then accept or reject requests to follow you on an individual basis.

(As an example, aceywinters is one user I follow with a locked timeline.)

More subjectively, research - and the social sciences in general - are just like any other science or scientific process: It can be used for any number of ends, good or evil.

In that sense, it's just like strong cryptography, steganography, and anonymity systems - things that I've strongly advocated proliferation of for a number of years. The only difference is, those three systems protect privacy, while Twitter is on the other end of the spectrum - it can be a medium of publication.