Twitter
'Twitter is a social networking and microblogging service, owned and operated by Twitter Inc., that enables its users to send and read other users' messages called tweets' - Wikipedia
Twitter allows you to do many different things including 'following' recieving and sending 'tweets' and generally keeping in touch with friends all over the world easily and for free. It is a free site and very easy to set up it takes only a few seconds, by going to twitter and clicking on 'sign up' you fill in a few simple details including: 'name' 'username' 'email address' and 'password' and then your done and a member of twitter.
The tweets are text based and can contain up to 140 characters, as where originally designed for use on phones. The concept of 'following' is that you can subscribe or invite other people on twitter and then there page will appear on your list and it is easy to see what several people are doing at once. It isn't only friends you can follow either it is anything from your best friend to your favourite celebrity.
All 'tweets' posted on twitter can be viewed unless senders restrict message delivery to their friend list, but this does mean most things you post are not private.
As with any site there are both pros and cons: A big advantage of twitter is that it is easy to navigate & update, link to and promote anything, which makes it suitable for anyone to use. Good communication settings and icons means that rapid response is available making the process of talking to friends easy and stress free. The fact that it is a worldwide site means you can talk to people all over the world and keep in contact with friends you meet on holiday or ones that have moved, or even just reach beyond your inner circle of friends. Another good thing is that it is easy to find friends and also people that you may know that have been recommended to you.
There are few disadvantages to twitter, the main one being that there is limited functionality, as you can simply: find people, send brief messages, direct replies, which after a while becomes a waste of time if done too often. Also the fact that there is a limit of 140 characters per update limits some people on what they want to say.
I think it is clear that overall twitter is a good site to use and it's easy, the fact you can see what celebrites and famous people are doing makes many people enjoy using it. It isn't really a private way of communicating with friends but it is a fun, easy & free way to.
Twitter does often appear in the press for many reasons, especially for famous people saying abusive or disrespectful things on their post which are then picked up on before they have time to delete them. Also many stars use the site to promote themselves or to defend themselves.
In this story it explains how it discovered that there was a techincal flaw which allowed any twitter user to force another to subscribe to their ‘tweets’ without the ‘follower’ giving permission, which meant thousands of stars found themselves following complete strangers.
This story shows the problems twitter finds due to the fact it has no way of monitoring the age of users or what they are viewing. The failure of this security system means that children signing up for twitter can receive advertisements and messages from pornographic websites and escort services.
In this news article it explains how a labour candidate is facing a police inquiry after she revealed the results of a sample of postal ballots one week before the General Election.
No comments:
Post a Comment