Your Status-Q quote for the day comes from Norman Lewis’s eTel talk:
The search for acknowledgement is the key to most online activity.
Yesterday I signed up for a Twitter account, to see what all the fuss was about. I was more interested in it as a social phenomenon than because I actually wanted to use it. Which probably indicates that I’m getting old.
For those who don’t know it, Twitter is all the rage amongst the youth of today. You can type out a few words saying what you’re currently doing, and anyone interested in watching can keep up to date with your exciting life. Twitter is to instant messaging what blogging is to email; it’s chiefly a broadcasting mechanism rather than a conversation. This is very convenient for the youth of today, who would otherwise need to send the same updates to their 15 simultaneous IM conversations.
You can send Twitter updates using your mobile, via the web, using an IM client, or a dedicated application, and you can keep track of your friends in a variety of ways including via RSS.
To clarify things, here’s the ‘History of blogging’:
(Many thanks to Dave Briggs, who found this on Mashable.)
RSS feed
Spooky. I was just reading about Twitter here: http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/features/item/Ultimate_Reality_or_Ultimate_Mindlessness.php
(sorry, AllAboutSymbian comes alphabetically before Status-Q in my RSS reader). I think I’ll avoid twittering 🙂
However, some friends have introduced me to http://www.facebook.com which seems like a grown-up and better designed equivalent of MySpace for college students (although it’s now open for all). This has a “status” line, which I might update each week, if I have time. I quite like the privacy settings on FaceBook, so you can restrict who sees your photos, and it’s gratifying to the ego to “collect” more on-line friends.
Another use for twitter, for us meanies, is that I can send text messages to my friends mobiles for FREE from anywhere in the world. Plus as you say its useful for keeping in touch with a group of friends.