If you were to conduct a survey that asked people "what's Twitter?," what do you think they would say? I can tell you that a majority would not even have a clue the main purpose of it, and the other half would only attempt to describe it. Either way, both groups have misconceptions about the popular social "utility", and it's time to get some cleared up.
The big misconception that people have about Twitter is that it's just another Facebook. Another site where you can tell your followers what you did last night. The simple answer to that hypothesis is no! Facebook and Twitter are used in different ways, and arguably one cannot be substituted for the other. As most of us know, Facebook is about you. It's a network of your pictures, statuses, comments, and a whole bunch of personal information that some people should not even know about. Simply enough, Facebook is a book with your face on it, and everything inside this book is about you. Twitter is not about you, it's about the world around you. Twitter asks you to answer the question "What's Happening?," because it wants you to share the world around you from your perspective. If Facebook is about the individual, than Twitter is about information (in real time!). Twitter users are what I like to call "citizen journalists", because information is passed around by regular ordinary citizens, just like you.
Of course there are going to be people out there who tweet unneeded information like what they ate for breakfast this morning, but all they're doing is wasting their own time. If your looking for a conversation, then go onto Facebook where you can also tell your friends how delicious it was! Twitter is not used for a conversation, it just wasn't intended to be.
My views on Facebook are not off the record, just read The Demise of Facebook and The Demise of Facebook II. I'm all about useful information and that is why I like Twitter. I use it everyday to get updates from my favourite news networks, sports networks, my family & friends, journalists, celebrities, and so much more. The most fascinating feature of Twitter is "Twitter Search" that will search what people are tweeting about in real-time. I use Google as a secondary search engine when it comes to trends and current events because Twitter Search is much more up-to-date and current.
Media plays a massive role in how we get our information, and what Twitter does is get rid of the middleman between the event and the media. Before Twitter, an event would occur and we would hear it on TV (biased or unbiased), but now, an event occurs and we get first hand information from Twitter, unbiased and direct as it was intended to be, before we hear it on TV. Twitter lets the people play the middleman, and it allows for neutral, firsthand information right from the source.
Put it this way, I found out Michael Jackson died 10 minutes before it was on TV. The point isn't about the 10 minute difference, it's about the speed at which information travels firsthand and how it has become a major source for millions of people. Journalists on CNN were tweeting the information before it was on TV. It's fast, it's convenient, and it's not Facebook! What else do you want?
