So I don't check my Twitter account very often, but I do check it more often than facebook. What I like about twitter is the lack of extensive personal profiles and it's quick, concise, and most importantly
relevant format. While the short posts do allow for a lot of pointless b.s. they are also useful for getting across what is important in a very quick fashion. At Twitter's homepage there is always a ticker showing what is currently trending on the sirte so it's easy to see what people are interested in at the time. Recently it has allowed people to relay breaking news as it happens much quicker than "real" news sources. Granted, I started looking into this because one of my favorite bands broke some tour "news" on Twitter but my subsequent "Twitter news" searches yeilded some pretty interesting results.On 10/31 there was a sustantial earthquake in southern California. This graph shows the response time of a couple of local news sources versus Twitter updates which began almost immediately.This is the second time this has happened as far as earthquakes are concened. Twitter beat the AP first on this issue in July 2008.
My sister who is a journalist in Lexington tells me that many news sources are now watching social media heavily as a source for leads and breaking news. I find
www.twitter.com/breakingnews to be pretty informative personally.There are several accounts like this which allows you to get breaking news on your phone if your into that sort of thing.
I was just thinking about this today. I follow Mashable News, Mashable Social Media, and CNN on Twitter. I have found that I get more out of reading these tweets, than getting online and reading the site, or even watching the news in the morning. I feel like reporters need to be watching this more. I know that I checked Facebook the entire time during the tornado warning a week ago, because I didn't know if we were going to have class or not. Good post!
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