2 comments on this entry.

  • Jazmeister | 23 Jun 2009

    No, he’s right! Twitter is a sequence of 1 to 1 communications, and therefore isn’t a social network. Just like talking to people, and writing letters. You can’t build social groups with those! Duh!

  • Tom | 23 Jun 2009

    Well, it really isn’t; it’s a haphazard combination of 1-1, 1-group, and 1-all (broadcast). I mainly use it to broadcast to groups (ie: ‘who wants a beer tonight’, still my most common usage). And broadcast systems are ways of building communities, groups, “social networks” (which is such a horrible term anyhow). Look at CB radio, for instance; it’s just a transport mechanism for voice chat, but it becomes a useful tool as well as a social hub for long-distance truckers and radio hams. Twitter, at its core, is just a messaging bus; then, it becomes whatever its users make it.

    But also: I disagree because there’s far more value in services built around social objects than around just connecting you to people. The idea of listening to last.fm with my friends is far more interesting than another box to look at Facebook on.

    Not duh at all, I’m afraid. I’m not going to go on longer here, mainly because I’ve got one-and-a-half conference sessions on this subject to write in the next three weeks and they’ll like be online, but basically: my disagreement was not just with this quotation, but with quite a bit of the article. My disagreement is based on deeper knowledge than a single delicious comment contains.