Social Networking Part 2 - Twitter

In my first blog on Social Networking I talked about Facebook and how I am not only a member and have been for a while, I enjoy the ease and the ability to communicate with friends and family all over the world.

Knowing how to use Facebook, I went exploring and found myself curious about 'Twitter,' as again, everyone was talking about it, radio stations, and celebrities alike, so I thought, what's the big deal?

So I signed up to Twitter...
Wikipedia describes Twitter as: Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read other users' updates known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length...
Or In the words of one radio station host on Nova last night - a poor man's Facebook.

So why would I get onto Twitter and give 140 character length description of what i am doing now, later or ever? Twitter to me should have been developed BEFORE Facebook, so you learn to talk about yourself in brief sentences, then you can move onto Facebook and expand to 'Wall-to-wall' and e-mails.
Or is Twitter simplifying Facebook for people who find too hard to maintain?

I think I could learn to appreciate Twitter, but unless I have friends on there to 'tweet' to (yes, tweet is an acceptable use of wording(!?), I don't think it would hold my attention. I did find about 3 people I actually knew, which also surprised me, Twitter is one of the most talked about sites at the moment, so I assumed I was yet again the last to jump on the band wagon, when in fact in my circle of friends.

So instead of asking friends to follow my tweets, I am in turn following other people's tweets. Stephen Fry as recommended by another student in class, and Tori Amos to name a few (well there really are only a few), and when it came to the crunch I couldn't find many famous people I liked who were on Twitter. Maybe this is what it feels when you are one of the first to climb Mount Everest, it is very exciting, but also lonely waiting for everyone else to catch up...?

The question I have also asked myself about Twitter is this, 'Am I just delving more into the world of voyeurism?' Does following peoples Tweets make me nothing more than a nosey, peeping-Erin? And wouldn't following celebrities tweets encourage nothing more than our inner-stalkers? The same haunting feeling about Facebook can be translated to Twitter, are we sharing too much of ourselves to strangers?

So I have decided that moving forward and reviewing various 2.0 applications (as per the requirement of this blog), I am going to conclude with, does this application add value to my life?
Twitter is yet again another amazingly easy application to use, but with the lack of actual friends on the site and the limitations it puts on what you can do, I don't think I Twitter adds value to my life or time on the Internet.