That's this Peter Campbell. Having a deep and reflective conversation in 140 character bursts where you can examine different points of view, think out loud, share insights, and learn something - can be difficult on Twitter. Yes, twitter can start the sparks flying, but if you want the fire to burn - I think you need to blog it or write about or have a conversation. I think this some of what Marnie was getting at ...
I thought Peter was saying Twitter will replace Facebook/Myspace or social networks. He probably wasn't - but hard to get that when you're telegraphing ideas.
But as Charlene Li and Josh Bernhoff point out in their new book it is important to think behind the new tool - and to ask the larger question - how do you evaluate new technologies as they enter the landscape? Which ones deserve attention, which ones to ignore? They talked about ease of use, relationship enabling, shifts of power, community content, and open platform.
I pinged Peter and asked him to unpack his thoughts. I don't think you can take a deep dive with 140 characters -- and you don't want to take a deep dive with everything - but eventually you need to think more deeply than grazing micro-media.
At some point, our Twitter thoughts will be so long and formalize that we'll use a codebook to encapsulate them; you'll write YIOPT YINSO YISEV YIVIZ YOHUS The Antarctic Dictionary WYNUS emv and that will deal with the whole paragraph you'd normally type.
see http://vielmetti.typepad.com/telegraph/2008/04/wyssa-elizabeth.html for more of this.
Posted by: Edward Vielmetti | April 18, 2008 at 08:17 AM
Beth, I agree that microblogging serves a purpose and deep thinking isn't it. What I worry about with tools like Twitter is that people end up not digging more deeply because they develop the Twitter habit and lose the blogging habit. I've had to consciously think about using Twitter and not blogging everything, but I think it would be even easier to stop blogging in favor of tossing off quick 140 character thoughts. In the end, blogging is much harder work.
Posted by: Michele Martin | April 18, 2008 at 11:20 AM
Michelle, I 100% agree with you. The death of Twitter will be when folks overrely on it to do everything. The deep dives can only occur through actual conversation, blogging, wikis or any other structures that allow for a deeper and wider focus.
I haven't read Groundswell, but my concern is that as new tech enters the playing field we're going to start moving away from depth (which is where the new learning originates) in favor of a quick shallowness.
Posted by: Chris Bailey | April 24, 2008 at 05:43 AM