4th
My Take on Time Magazine’s Cover story: “How Twitter Will Change The Way We Live”
Decent, but not a great article. It starts off by talking about the usual complaint of people tweeting what they had for breakfast, and concludes: “what your friends had for breakfast is actually more interesting than it sounds.” WRONG. FAIL
That is a) NOT an interesting use of Twitter and b) the wrong way to promote its strengths to skeptics. The way to appeal to new users on the merits, is to explain the extraordinary power Twitter has as #1 a news aggregator, #2 as a replacement for RSS, and #3 its role as a real-time search engine. The article does a better job explaining #3 than it does #1 and #2.
However, one graf made a VERY good point, which was:
“it’s entirely possible that three or four years from now, we’ll have moved on to some Twitter successor. But the key elements of the Twitter platform — the follower structure, link-sharing, real-time searching — will persevere regardless of Twitter’s fortunes, just as Web conventions like links, posts and feeds have endured over the past decade. In fact, every major channel of information will be Twitterfied in one way or another in the coming years.” Well Said.
