Twitter is my first source for breaking news. If anything big (that I care about) happens, it will show up first in my Twitter feed. I guess a cable news channel might come close or a good all-news radio station (do those still exist?) but my Twitter stream is non-stop in my pocket. Smart news organization (NPR and Reuters, for example) know they need to have their stories where I am, rather than try to get me to come to where they are.
Tag Archives: Twitter
TwitVid
TwitVid is one of the countless apps that spring up around Twitter. I’d used it a time or two and started seeing it show up in tweets immediately after (during?) the tornado that hammered Joplin, MO. People were shooting amazing video with their phones and post directly to Twitter and Facebook via TwitVid.
So I’ve started using it again, mostly for short, update videos. Just a quick “check this out” clip. A bunch of our employees were posting photos and videos to our internal network during a tornado warning.
I’ve added a widget to the sidebar where you can browse my twitvids.
paper.li
I LOVE Twitter. It’s where I follow the insights and links of 131 like-minded souls. I tweet with some regularity but it’s the sum of these parts that makes Twitter so valuable/interesting to me.
paper.li compiles all of those tweets into a daily “paper.” While I prefer to follow my Twitter stream on my iPhone app or Tweeti on the MacBook, paper.li offers a better answer to: “What do you see in Twitter?!”
It’s like having 131 hand-picked editors, commentators and comedians, continuously scouring and curating the web just for me.
When the technology disappears
“One of the things I love about the iPad, for instance, is when you’re using the iPad, the iPad disappears, it goes away. You’re reading a book. You’re viewing a website, you’re touching a web site. That’s amazing and that’s what SMS is for me. The technology goes away and with Twitter the technology goes away. It’s so easy to follow anything you’re interested in. It’s so easy to tweet from wherever you are.”
— Twitter founder Jack Dorsey on Charlie Rose
Twitter and the Power of Giving People a Voice
“Many people are still focused on Twitter as a tool for promoting movies or TV shows, or see it as a toy that geeks and their friends play with to amuse themselves. The real power in what Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone created (and what Ev Williams later financed and built into a company) could well be that it is the simplest, the easiest and arguably one of the most efficient forms of mass publishing — or at least micro-publishing — ever invented.”
My favorite line from the post: “… a tweet can be passed around the world and back before newspaper reporters are even getting their shoes on.”