mardi 20 janvier 2009

Is Twitter the essence of Web 2.0?

I registered a long time ago on Twitter but it is only recently that I started to really use it properly(?). Actually I decided to do so after reading Guy Kawasaki’s article about how Twitter made his website better. I got curious and decided to give it a try to see if I could see some benefit in using it. I’ll make it short here because Twitter’s ROI is not the topic of this article but after a couple weeks of use I found it quite useful, especially to find knowledge and interesting articles about themes that I like.

I decided to write an article about this tool because I came across Venkatesh Rao’s article about “The Last Page of Web 2.0” where he considers that the last page of Web 2.0 is http://twitter.com/public_timeline. I am not going to discuss about whether this assumption is right or not. The article is really good and says a lot of interesting things about what Google is and why it is so successful. Besides I highly encourage you to read it.

In fact I just want to talk about one phrase that I read: “The Ultimate 2.0 Question: What are you doing?”

I’m wondering if the question in Twitter is “What are you doing?” rather than “What are you thinking?”. I totally agree with Venkatesh Rao when he says that the Google question is “What do you want to do?” but when it comes to the Twitter question, even though Twitter is asking you literally this question I doubt that this is what people are writing down and that this is the essence of Twitter.

If people were only talking about their personal actions then how could they interact with each other. Limiting my expression to my own behavior is also limiting the influence that I can have on others. And by definition my actions are personal. I believe that Twitter would be nothing else than a worldwide reality show where you can watch people live without being able to interact with them if everybody was really just saying what they were doing.

From my point of view I think that Twitter is more about “What are you thinking?”. In this case you take in account the possibility that some people might react to other’s actions and other’s ideas. People talk about more than actions there. They give their opinion, talk to each other, express themselves, share their mind with the world.

If Google is “What do you want to do?” maybe Twitter is “What do you want to say?”.

By the way, if you want to follow me, just search for stenpittet.

Aucun commentaire: