How Twitter Has Invaded Our Lives

If you haven’t been Twittering lately, then you haven’t lived at all. It seems that Twitter - the website that promotes blogging on a tiny scale - has captured the attention of plenty of people with lots of diverse motives for using it. At first glance you might wonder why everyone is so keen to use it. After all this really is blogging in a hurry - you get a mere 140 characters to say your piece, and that includes a link to another website if you want it.

But therein lies the attraction. It seems that a lot of people become intimidated or overwhelmed by the prospect of keeping up with the demands of a normal blog, whereas Twitter takes all those away by limiting the amount you can say. Of course there will always be those who join up and get started, only to abandon it as a waste of time just a few days later. So are there rewards on the site for those who seek them, or is it just another social networking site?

Whatever you think of Twitter, it certainly looks like it’s here to stay. It’s also very forward thinking, giving you the chance to receive Tweets (the Twitterworld’s name for one of its short blog posts) on your mobile phone. Quite why you would want to receive these when you could be following hundreds if not thousands of people is anyone’s guess, but some people obviously find it a good addition to the overall service since it’s still up and going.

As far as the website itself is concerned it’s quite basic in design, which really follows on from the simplicity of the idea behind it. It’s not always the easiest of sites to navigate or find what you’re looking for, but that doesn’t seem to deter the merry band of Twitterers who are growing ever larger by the second. And it looks like everyone is finding a different use for it – not least the number of internet marketers who use it to find an audience for their products and services, and let them know what’s going on in their business lives.

What started as a socially based site has perhaps inevitably been spotted and used for other means by people wanting to sell things online. That’s no bad thing, although some purists would probably argue that it’s abusing what Twitter was created for in the first place. So long as it’s not done to excess, most people don’t mind a bit of promotion - and that probably includes the Twitter staff themselves.

At the moment Twitter isn’t on the same level as other sites such as MySpace and Facebook, but if it carries on growing as it has done, who’s to say that it won’t catch up? At the end of the day it has a unique function that simply isn’t served anywhere else, and that is what is attracting huge amounts of people to sign up and start micro-blogging about whatever makes them happy.

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