Two Days of Twitter

What is Twitter? Twitter is a social networking, microblogging application that allows you to view what other people are doing at any given moment. On the Twitter application, in order to “follow” someone and be able to view their updates you must subscribe to their updates.

For those of you in college, or anyone who has joined the Facebook craze recently, Twitter closely compares to the status update feature of Facebook.

As another assignment for my Advanced Public Relations Writing course, we were required to subscribe to Twitter and update at least five times within 48 hours. At first, I’ll admit I was somewhat skeptical of the idea. I am not a big fan of the news feed feature on Facebook, which I find intrusive, and I automatically connected that with Twitter.

Twitter is not like the news feed portion of Facebook; if anything it resembles the status update portion and nothing else. It is nice to be able to see what others are doing, ask questions of classmates and teachers, and develop relationships with people in your network on a level free of intimidation.

Entries on Twitter are limited to 140 words. This keeps messages intimate, makes it easy and fast to update, and recognizes the fact that in general, people don’t like to read.

Twitter focuses on personal relationships and can be a great social networking tool. I recommend signing up for Twitter, getting your friends to join and even working with professors and classmates to subscribe to the application.

I ended up updating much more than five times in my two days of Twitter. I feel much closer to my classmates since, and I think it really is a great place to strengthen relationships. Try out two days of Twitter, and I bet you’ll be hooked for much longer than that.