- Image via Wikipedia
The Internet was originally designed to be a military communication tool (Arpanet) and transitioned to becoming as well, a storage device or repository for University researchers. As the world wide web evolved for the rest of us, email became the communication choice du jour and the ’90s witnessed a slew of tools and applications for improving our two way communication and archival needs related to the electronic mail phenomenon. Even text messaging on a mobile phone is a development created to more ubiquitously enable and empower this two way conversation need of us social creatures.
Web 2.0 (Social Web) created new platforms for multi-user (beyond two-way) communication that could be both synchronous and asynchronous. Subscribing-to, befriending, and following status updates on platforms such as Facebook, Myspace, Ning Networks, and the like, have allowed for new spaces of communication to emerge. These new spaces resided in a specific place or page where aggregated communiques could be archived.
Twitter is a unique development that allows for the pure mind-surfing thought feeds provided by the status update feature of former platforms. Rather than providing a new space for interactive communication, Twitter provided a portal for calls to action. Whereas the crowd has been gathering in so many “spaces” (Ning, LinkedIn, etc), Twitter is not space-centered but » More: 6 Ways to Use Twitter as a Listening Device…
