My local newspaper, the Argus Leader, contains an article about "Twitter fever" finally arriving in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. The start of the article is interesting to read.
Following blogs online takes too much time. So Mike Vetter, 24, uses Twitter to keep up with friends and follow the short posts or "tweets" by people in his business.
"Twitter is called microblogging - small blogs - only up to 140 characters at a time," says Vetter, CEO of DataSync, a Sioux Falls software company. "If I were to follow 50 people blogging, I would be reading all day long. This way I can get the point, boiled down. It's blogging for lazy people."
Isn't that ironic? When blogging first became popular some of the criticisms bloggers heard was that blogs were too short and not polished enough. The thought was that blog posts would never hold the same attention by readers compared to real articles and stories written elsewhere. Now we forward forward to the present and we find that blogs contain too many words which is what spurring the Twitter movement. The length of a tweet is limited by 140 characters (roughly about the same as a text message in a cell phone).
Following this line of thought, I'm now convinced that by the time my five year old son becomes a teenager he'll call Twitter too inefficient. Instead his generation and their even shorter attention span will require you to send messages at 7 characters or less. What would we call this new service, Twit?
After three decades of embracing technology, I think I finally arrived between the old way and the new ways of doing things. My case in point, I found this article in the print version of my Sunday newspaper. At the same time, I'm ready to read what you think of the article via my Twitter account.
