Can Twittering Be Taught, or do we all end up Twats?
Around the office in the weeks preceeding Christmas, festive Twittering was running rampant. The clicking of fingers across keyboards embodying the very images of little birds chirping that would have the CEO's at Twitter HQ salivating more than a dog in heat... However the post Christmas-blues seems to now have the public tweetstream filled with nothing but vague resolutions and people finally waking up to the concept of tweeting, with idiotic mispelt messages, and information only useful to their mothers.
Which raises an interesting question, how in 2009 are we going to do something interesting with Twitter. As Barack Obama goes on to be President of the US this week, being the only successful user of twitter that seems to have had any significant impact outside of the Social Media Mogul world, the question seems all the more pertinent?
What are we going to do with Twitter. It seems the key issue is that to a newbie, a fledgling digital sparrow about to fly the online roost of more homely, snuggly environments of MySpace and Facebook, the whole Twitter ethos seems to stark a world.
Behind it's cosy, cutesy image Twitter returns us a communication method much akin to SMS, one that is essential - Rude. There is something terrible offensive at the core of things that if used for a direct communication, you can only be bothered with 140 characters, let alone pick up the mobile phone from which you are most likely tweeting and call the person.
There are obvious applications for the service in the realms of internal communications. This seems obvious. If for nothing more to inform all your staff at once that there is free coffee in the bar, or that its pay day (as if they didn't know already), surely this is worthwhile? One is yet to see this embraced fully, examples on a postcard... or maybe a carrier pigeon would be more apt?