How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live - TIME - 0 views
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Yes, the breakfast-status updates turned out to be more interesting than we thought. But the key development with Twitter is how we've jury-rigged the system to do things that its creators never dreamed of.
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In short, the most fascinating thing about Twitter is not what it's doing to us. It's what we're doing to it.
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Injecting Twitter into that conversation fundamentally changed the rules of engagement. It added a second layer of discussion and brought a wider audience into what would have been a private exchange. And it gave the event an afterlife on the Web. Yes, it was built entirely out of 140-character messages, but the sum total of those tweets added up to something truly substantive, like a suspension bridge made of pebbles.
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This is a great article about twitter. And I really like the idea that it is a LOT about what we can DO with twitter data that makes it so compelling (all those great apps out there). "Websites that once saw their traffic dominated by Google search queries are seeing a growing number of new visitors coming from "passed links" at social networks like Twitter and Facebook. This is what the naysayers fail to understand: it's just as easy to use Twitter to spread the word about a brilliant 10,000-word New Yorker article as it is to spread the word about your Lucky Charms habit. Put those three elements together - social networks, live searching and link-sharing - and you have a cocktail that poses what may amount to the most interesting alternative to Google's near monopoly in searching."
