I am not surprised by how many people still don’t get the point of Twitter. The running joke about Twitter has always been “no one cares what you ate for lunch.” While there are some really useless tweets, I admit freely that a few of mine are meaningless, but that’s part of sharing a piece of your life online. There are experiences that exist on Twitter or other social media sites that could not have occurred previously.
This is going to be the way I explain why Twitter isn’t just a time waster:
On Sunday, being the first day of the new month, I decided to listen to a The Week of August First by The Impossibles. I was listening to it on Swift.fm, which connects Twitter users to music, and tweeted it out. A few minutes later I saw a response to my tweet by a user called prioritiesntact. Now, Priorities Intact was a song by The Impossibles so I was intrigued. Turns out it’s one of the guys from The Impossibles!
Lady Gaga has over 5 million followers and has 450 tweet as of today. But a lot of these are just broadcasts rather than interaction with her followers/fans. How many people can say one of their favorite bands retweeted them? That simple interaction of listening to a song and the artist responding to you personally couldn’t happen without social media unless both of you happened to be in the same physical space. That’s what Twitter can do. Not just tell people things, but share back and forth.