Reinventing the News: Twitter

I'm not really sure that I understand the entire concept behind Twitter. After looking around on their website for some time, they claim to have started to allow people to keep in touch with one another by updating your status and posting links on their pages. Some people use it as a tool for people to know what they are doing throughout the day while other news organizations use it to interact with the public or update the news. 

Steve Garfield uses his twitter feed to update people on his whereabouts as well as link to news articles, including ones that he has written in his blog. Today alone he updated his twitter feed about 18 times, letting people know witty anecdotes about how his day was going because he had been summoned for jury duty. He has over 5,000 followers and people respond to his twitter feed, leaving links and comments to things that Steve has said or written about. I think this kind of twitter feed works well because it creates conversation as opposed to just posting links on your twitter feed to additional articles. 

Twitter feeds such as the one put up by Election Watch simply post links to articles about President-Elect Obama from other news sources such as the New York Times and Bloomberg. There are no commentaries about the articles and people do not respond to their posts. They have a small amount of followers, around 300, but nobody responds to their posts and they do not respond to anyone else's posts, which seems a bit ridiculous to me. I think that this type of feed serves no real purpose because it generates no conversation. 

One news organization that does a nice job of fully using twitter is WBUR. They post items pertaining to news as well as respond to people that follow their twitter feeds. WBUR responds to people while they are working and make reference to the fact that they are in the newsroom and that it is loud. They have a pretty decent following around 1,500 people. 

I feel that as a journalism tool Twitter is a good site for networking purposes but aside from that I really see no need for it. To me it seems as though the updates of status are similar to Facebook and I'm sure that most of the people using Twitter have a Facebook as well and don't need to update their status in two places. I don't see it as something I will be using in the future although I never say never about anything.