The very name of the service -- Twitter -- brings to my mind the worst performance of a play I was ever involved in... The Importance of Being Earnest. Callow, inexperienced theater people who didn't know their lines, trying (and failing) to capture some of the subtlety of Oscar Wilde. Twittering, the Victorian females. Posturing, the males.
When my graduate student friends at UW introduced me to it, I had a difficult time imagining it as anything more than a fleeting fad. Now it is the single most important social networking tool I use, and you'd have to be unattentive in the extreme not to have heard of its role in political events and natural disasters at home and (especially) abroad. Professionally, it is the most effective current awareness service I've ever had, as well as the most frequent communication channel I have to one of our kids (Hi, @theinfodesk!) Twitter long ago replaced a news reader as my tool of choice for 'keeping up'... and not just keeping up, but getting ahead. Choose your sources well, and you can feel the pulse of breaking developments, whether personal, professional, politcal, and even seismological.
This is old news to most anyone likely to be reading my blog, but the contrast between Twitter and the social networking 'service' I wrote about in my previous post, is so stark I wanted to balance yesterday's negativity.
I'd also like to call out my favorite Twitterer. My personal MVT award goes to Dan Brickley (@danbri). Who gets yours? Tweet it with the hash tag #MVTwitter (miraculously, it is unsullied!)
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More great screens at the Nezu Museum in Tokyo
