

Ask YC: Twitter is the most exciting technology...? - mingyeow

Descriptions range from it being the "most exciting technology i have come across" (Tim OReilly) to "lame tool for people who like to hear themselves talk" and "illusion of being desired"&#60;p&#62;What do YOU think of Twitter?
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raamdev
One of the coolest things about Twitter is how it allows you to see, in almost
real-time, what huge groups of people are talking about.

You can see a map with where people are posting on Twitter from:
<http://twittervision.com/>

You can see a real-time tag cloud showing what topics people are talking about
on Twitter: <http://www.twitscoop.com>

And of course, you can search Twitter to see what people are saying about
something: <http://search.twitter.com>

Case in point: A few weeks ago there was a Yahoo outage on the East-Coast for
about 40 minutes. When I first discovered it, I searched Twitter for "Yahoo"
and found a dozen people within the past minute complaining Yahoo was down.
This quickly confirmed the outage for me.

These are just a few examples, but I think you get the idea. I rebelled
against Twitter at first, but now I think it's awesome. The turning point for
me was actually a Penny Arcade comic (<http://tinyurl.com/6gh4lg>) and the
follow-up blog post (<http://tinyurl.com/5c4zds>) that made me realize
(<http://tinyurl.com/5tj2kk>) I don't use Twitter for what they intended (to
answer the question, "What are you doing?"). Twitter is exciting because the
number of possible things it can be used for are nearly endless and the ways
the data can be used are almost equally as endless.

Another awesome usage of Twitter that I've seen recently is the way site
admins are using Twitter to leave status updates about the outage. They list
their Twitter feed on the "We'll be right back" page, but since it's Twitter,
people can choose to "follow" the user and get updates without visiting the
site (if they enable "mobile updates", they'll even get notified via SMS).
mininova.org is one site I've noticed using Twitter like this.

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ErrantX
I think it has a few uses. People like Robert Scoble have a lot of influence
on there - and he spends a lot of time connecting people together. Which is
really useful.

Companies are finding it useful for guerilla marketting.. which is bad when
it's spam but if done right can be a thousand times better than a blog.

You also get to connect with people you never knew existed. Scoble retweeted a
comment I made about Oauth and it led ot me having a fun discussion about it
(and getting some new ideas etc.) with people who agreed and disagreed. We'll
probably never chat again but I found some interesting people to follow and we
hammered out ideas really well.

And then it can be just a simple comunications tool. I love seeing what people
are up to (in a non freaky way) and Twitter is more real time that a lot of
other social networks out there. I think probably due to the # of desktop
tools.

Anyway - a month ago I would have said "nah it's a nice idea but full of
idiots" now I say: it's still full of idiots but when you get past the spam
and self importance ( _cof_ john chow _cof_ ) then there are some real gems
there.

:)

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shadowhand
Twitter is like having a blog with very short posts. The upside is that
everything happens at a much faster rate (syndication + feedback), the
downside is that it is hard to have consistently good content. Using it as a
information distribution network is really nice for open source.

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bootload
_"... Twitter is the most exciting technology ..."_

Pretty much a POTs replacement for the Internet with voice mail & conference
calls.

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noodle
i'm neutral on it. i don't think its an exciting new technology, but i don't
think its exactly totally lame, either. its useful but not groundbreaking. it
just feels special because of the tech echo chamber that formed around it.

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minalecs
i still don't get it. i try.. and want to like it, but have not found anything
useful

