Do you Twitter ?

The first reaction many people have to Twitter is bemusement. Why would they need to read short messages about what someone ate for lunch? It’s a valid question to ask. Twitter is flooded by constant updates from its 14 million users, who visited its site 99 million times in March 2009 to read posts tapped out with mobile phones and computers. Individually, many of those 140-character “tweets” seem vacuous. But taken collectively, the stream of messages can turn Twitter into a surprisingly useful tool for solving problems and providing insights into the digital mood. By dipping into the world’s collective brain, researchers of all kinds have found that if they make the effort to dig through these mundane comments, the live conversations offer an early glimpse into public sentiments — and could even help them shape it.

Why Twitter?

The meaning of Twitter as per word web dictionary is “a series of chirps made by birds” which truly signifies the actual usage of Twitter. It starts with just one simple question “What are you doing”. It is just this trivial, vacuous comment made by a user which might not be of much relevance to the world around but it is this feeling of sharing your thought which connect people and has resulted into such a wide spread use of Twitter.

"The first reaction is to hate it because it's seen as the most useless thing in the world and no one would ever want to know about boiling water. But these small details in life are what connect us most. Everyone has these specific moments and you normally don't bring them up in conversation because it seems so trivial but it's not, it's really important." Twitter founder and chief executive Jack Dorsey told AFP (Net at witter with Twitter, Business line Newspaper, 2007).

There are some users who just follow celebrities and who simply observe what others are saying. For them it is just this feeling of being connected and being a part of coterie which means a lot. Average time spent on the site is 9.3 minutes/day. This amount of time which being average also corroborates the above point that some might be using it for hours together as this site being a micro blogging site does not offer anything except for the updates from other users.

“Some people simply sit and watch the timeline roll by, said Twitter designer Biz Stone. Stone, 31, says the vision of Twitter as the future of communication came clear to him weeks ago when a tweet from friends told him of a California earthquake as he was about to get on an underground train in the state. "It was an immediate pulse that sums up the zeitgeist of Twitter," Stone said to AFP (Net at witter with Twitter, Business line Newspaper, 2007).