Nothing more than a Personal Branding Tool
…is what Twitter is. And it fits very well the egocentric nature of most security dudes (el hackerz), and therefore they are all on Twitter, twittering their way out of the rat race. The only problem I see with micro blogging platforms, such as Twitter, is that there is almost no value whatsoever from your contributions but a bunch of meaningless messages – a history of someone’s no so interesting life.
Don’t get me wrong. Twitter is a good social/communication tool. It works well to deliver small messages to the world. However, essentially Twitter is nothing more than a glorified version of an Instant Messaging client where everybody can see what you are saying. It is a personal branding tool – good for staying in touch with your peers in a very open fashion but bad for anything else.
This is the reason why I prefer blogs, wikis, etc. They are designed to build communities and build on the top of information which can later be reused and build upon. Information is important. It drives progression. Twitter creates noise. I guess this is the secret for its success.
Well, everything new will become old! And Twitter’s roots are as old as the Internet, perhaps even more. The idea will fade away with the time and after that it will raise again, repackaged in a shiny new box and given back to the masses.
Or you can use it to remote control the lights of a Xmas tree. There’s some value into building that ;-)
@TweetXmasTree
twitter is noise, its a devolution of the textual based internet that will likely be little more than a fad
true :) I think that in general, just because Twitter supports SMS updates, it is a really good broadcast tool. it should serve well for updates in case of emergency, etc.
I agree that Twitter is about branding, but isn’t all social interaction?
I don’t see blogs and Twitter as all that different; Twitter is basically an extension of your main site, which is also largely about personal branding.
So yes, Twitter is about ego and branding, but so is blogging, using mailing lists, or any other form of thrusting your ideas out in front of other people with the desire to discuss them or get questions answered.
All three mediums have the ability to be valuable tools for solving problems or answering questions, or can end up being social drivel. There’s very little difference.
[...] pdp writes in a recent blog that Twitter is nothing more than a personal branding tool. I sort of agree with him, but only if I don’t have to accept that this is much different than other public communication channel. [...]