Twitter Yes or Twitter No

I had a good number of discussions/arguments on Twitter(A.K.A micrblogging) and the hype around it with many of my friends and colleagues. Many of them think twitter is rubbish and serves no purpose.

Nay sayers generally argue, why do you want to know pointless status updates of others, how many are your friends, its better to do status updates on facebook

Without getting into the debate of how good it is, I believe Twitter is revolutionary and will be a critical tool in how people connect and network with each other.

Social networkers serve a dual role as both the suppliers and consumers of content, and your experience depends on the kind of content supplied by others. What will you do if none of your friends are on the same social network, what will you do on a social network without an active community? What will you do if no one is contributing (supplying) content?

The problem I see is, users fail to understand how twitter works and what they can do on twitter. We are not used to this kind of real time communication channel

Twitter enables you to have conversations, some time beyond your friend circle, connect with a diverse set of users (mostly techies and 2.0 kind of guys)

So the core experience on twitter depends on who you are actually following on twitter, the kind of content they generate and quality of conversations you participate in.

Agreed you feel lost if none of your offline friends are using twitter and you are the first one on twitter. But if you want to connect with some interesting users in areas of your interest (like start ups, web2.0, tech, politics, sports) you should give twitter a try, because that’s where conversations are happening, not on Facebook groups


Twitter yes or Twitter no?

The answer to it depends on what do you want to do on a tool/service(FB or Twitter).
Do you want to network with people?
Do you want to connect with your friends?
Do you want to take part in discussions/conversations via groups or on real time?
Who do you want to talk with? (2.0 guys or friends)


You will enjoy twitter:
If you follow people who are creating content with similar interests ( like say u r interested in F1 and connected with users who are creating interesting content about F1)

Or your real life friends are active on twitter


I guess many started using twitter because of reason 1

So how can I connect with users of my interest? It may take time to find people you are interested in connecting with, but move slowly, try to understand how it works, use search.twiiter.com, track hash tags, use hash tags.

Reason 2, will take some more time to happen, I hardly know any one who loves twitter because many of their offline friends are updating their status messages on twitter

Twitter is growing like crazy, but the challenge they may face is getting on board users who understand twitter at first go, or else users will skip it as one more dotcom with no real purpose

The second question people generally ask me is difference between updating status messages on FB and Twitter

There is hell lot of difference

Networking on twitter is much easy, and you can easily find a bunch of people who have similar interests, and start talking with them with little effort. On FB u can find people, but can’t easily talk with them


On FB your r status messages or not search able, its reach has limitations, its personal(to you and your friends) and are not part of conversations. Twitter is more open, u can use it with various tools and developers have more scope of building useful tools. Openness is a limitation on facebook and thus limits innovation

FB has recently copied some twitter functionality, but its question of Open Vs Private and both are popular for there own reasons