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Twitterpated
May 26, 2007

I've often told librarians in talks I give to "dabble" with new technologies to see what they're about and to consider whether or not they hold promise for libraries. For example, in the past I've spent time on social networking sites like Tribe.net and Orkut.com, both of which I soon decided were not my cup of tea. But having had that experience, I know about them and can have intelligent conversations with others about their benefits and drawbacks.

One of my latest "dabble" projects is Twitter.com. The idea behind Twitter is that you tell it what you are doing throughout the day in no more than 140 characters (maybe a couple sentences) and your friends can follow what you're up to. You can twitter via the web, or cellphone, or instant messaging, or all three. On your personal twitter web page you see "twitters" from all of your friends ordered chronologically from the most recent. Or you can view all of the twitters from anyone who has made their page public by going to their Twitter page. For example, here is John Edwards' Twitter page. I guess I shouldn't be insulted that he has many more followers than I do.

To this point I'm not quite sure what I think of it. Over the course of a normal day I don't think it really does that much for me. But somewhere where it really did come in handy was at a conference. It ends up being a really good way to find out where your friends are and which programs are good or not.

So the first definition for "twitterpated" in the Urban Dictionary is "to be completely enamored with someone/something". So am I twitterpated over Twitter? No, not by a long shot, but I'm not quite done dabbling yet.

Posted by Roy Tennant on May 26, 2007 | Comments (1)