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rtprseottsimon Re: Maureen Dowd's Twitter column: I thought founders were funnier than the columnist&I respect her for letting them win in her own home. 5:14 PIvI Apr 23rd from web
Pogue OH CRUD!!! Presidential speech is pre-empting my CNBC video today for the SECOND CONSECUTIVE WEEK. (Will be online, though.) ©#$<§#$&!&*"&., . 11:44 AM Apr 23rd from TweetDeck
Stephanopoulos Just finished breakfast (flatbread w sour cherries) in Tehran. Saw President Ahmedinejad yesterday. Trying to see Roxana Saberi today 1 2:1 5 AM Apr 23rd from web
It's OK to be sick and tired of Twitter. Heaven knows, it may be the world's most overhyped technology, the latest in an ever-lengthening list of overhyped technologies and cultural techno-fads stretehing back to CB radio. LexisNexis counts more than 3,000 news stories mentioning the microblogging service in a five-day period in mid-April alone. A Google search churns up 400 million mentions. Naturally, a Twitter backlash is in full swing; no less than the likes of Maureen Dowd, Garry Trudeau and "The Daily Show" have made fun of this latest media obsession.
The withering overexposure no doubt reflects jour- nalists' status as members of the Twittering class. Some well-known news-media names now have Twitter fol- lowings that are almost as large as the circulation of their newspapers or viewership of their TV shows. "This Week" host George Stephanopoulos had more than 564,000 people following his 140-character tweets as of mid-May. Stephanopoulos, tweeting on April 22: "Just finished breakfast (flatbread w sour cherries) in Tehran. Saw President Ahmedinejad yesterday. Trying to see Roxana Saberi today." Other mass-media Twitteurs include "Meet the Press" host David Gregory (528,356 followers), MSNBC's Rachel Maddow (506,951), National Public Radio host Scott Simon (360,861), and New York Times technology columnist David Pogue (306,371).
For journalists, the real question is whether Twitter is more than just the latest info-plaything. Does it "work" in any meaningful way - as a news-dissemination channel, a reporting and source-building tool, a promotional platform? Or is it merely, to buy the caricature, just a banal, narcississtic and often addictive time suck?
The unsatisfying answer: It all depends.
For anyone still in the dark about Twitter, a quick bit of background: Twitter, created by a San Francisco startup called Obvious and publicly released...