Firstly there’s a piece about Inside Twitter in the Guardian
The piece itself is pretty good. But it’s the comments underneath that are the telling bit. It’s full of the usual nonsense and lots of people moaning that Twitter is this year’s Friends Reunited blah blah blah.
But you know what, to me it doesn’t matter. Twitter is a real thing. It’s something that people are using and enjoying, and it’s changing the way that lots of people spend big chunks of their connected time. Surely anything that affords change in this way can never be seen as a total waste of time?
This piece on Murketing makes some really interesting points about the point of pointlessness. Here’s a flavour of the piece:
Yes. Twitter freaks don’t want to say, “Look, I’m just messing around. I’m goofing off. Yes, it’s a waste of time, but that’s the whole point.” Instead you get the stuff about Twitter being more important than CNN, or about new forms of community, or truth-to-power revolution, and like that. And yeah those arguments can sort of be backed up by examples — but so can counter-arguments about banality and narcisissm.
If it is play, why not just say so? Why not just say it’s fun? After all, one of the reasons “play” is always in vogue in certain business magazines is that it really is important to creativity — taking yourself out of the routine makes your thinking less rigid, etc.
It’s worth a read. Really.
And finally this piece from Umair Haque’s blog at Harvard Business entitled Twitter’s Ten Rules For Radical Innovators gets across some of the bigger more important things that Twitter represents. There’s some typically ‘Harvard Business’ comments too, which are worth skimming. But in general I’m a huge fan of this piece.
I’m not going to spoil it by listing out the rules – go and read it.
