If you Google “Twitter”, you will probably come up with pages that either damn Twitter to the darkest depths or praise it up to the roof tops.

Like it or not Microblogging is here to stay, at least until for the foreseeable future.

So what is it about Twitter that we love / hate?

Are you a Twit-voyeur or a Twit-exhibitionist?

Do you like lurking in the shadows reading Tweets or do you need to tell the world that you are just off to the toilet?

Even without reading the numerous blogs on the subject we can imagine some of the downsides of using Twitter.

Well there’s the vast amount of time ‘wasted’ on Tweets, we don’t need to be logged into a computer, thanks to iphones and other smartphones which can be set to update tweets at regular intervals.

Studies have shown that interruptions are one of the biggest time-stealers and contributes greatly to workplace stress.

It is said that concentration levels need between 7 and 11 minutes to be restored after an interruption.

You don’t have to be a mathematician to work out how much time can be wasted a day by a person tweeting every 3 minutes.

It could be argued that they would be living in a constant state of dispersion due to the frequency of interruptions, indeed work could be seen as an interruption in this scenario.

Some say that the sense of community is being eroded by microblogging – some would ask ‘what sense of community?’ and others would add that tweets actually add to a sense of distant and virtual community.

Tweets are made up of 140 characters, apparently a throwback to the length of a text SMS at the time Twitter was being developed, although the creators claim that it is intentionally brought about for “the style guide of the short form”. Well it sounds a good excuse, doesn’t it.

It was incidentally developed totally by serendipity, the inventor was apparently working on an application for a website that was later abandoned (the appli) – saved from the bin and remains what it is now, a microblogging social community network.

Purists may argue that language skills are damaged by abbreviated and truncated words used in Tweets, whereas proponents may argue that creative flow takes primacy over form and accuracy.

Some progressive teachers have even tried to get kids connected by using Twitter in a classroom setting to aid learning – you can imagine the reaction of some of their colleagues. The principle of using Tweets in learning almost bears some credence – information in convenient bites that can then be sequenced and chunked together – without lifting too many stones, there could be a point here.

Perhaps this would also act in some way in a counter productive way for learners with short attention spans and there appears to be little or no research on the effects on long-term memory for this.

Some examples from business use of Twitter illustrate polarised effects – some companies use Twitter for (free) advertising and marketing and some use guerilla marketing tactics to peddle their wares. Habitat used the spam hashtags to place their ads in the top ten, using #apple, #spam and #mms before their ads for their spring collection.

US pharmacy giant Pfizer have apparently enrolled 100+ of their executives in their Twitstream to tweet about the company. This is a mirror of what Johnson & Johnson did in 2007, where they encouraged 120,000 of their employees to own a blog and to blog about the company in a positive way – this fell flalty on i
ts face after a take up of only 2 blogs. There are as many success stories of Twitter marketing as there are flops.

Fox news reported on a serial tweeter who consulted her tweets at least 50 times a day (50 x 7 minutes = 5.83 hours).

She had a problem that required a call to a company’s customer services department and instead of calling she wrote tweets about the problem and was subsequently contacted by the company – pretty effective.

The company in question said that they regularly swept the twitterboards for mentions of their name and products and that this was now regular practice.

Tweeters (do we really call them that?) are being encouraged to help the police to fight crime. Chris Brown was reported in almost real-time driving his Bentley just prior to his arrest.

This has an obvious up side but also a slightly darker Orwellian side as we move towards total information overload and virtually 24 hour surveillance.

Don’t get mistaken by the idea that Twitter is used for people trying to make a quick buck, these are undoubtedly present, but rub shoulders in a way that they never could do out of the virtual universe, with stars such as Stephen Fry, David Bowie et al.

It would appear to be deemed an essential to have a Twitter account – be there or etc…

But have alook at their Tweets and make your own mind up about the relative merits of Twitter.

Stephen Fry – ok he is a serial technocrat – tells us that he’s just met Clive james at the Albert hall during the interval, just finished filming and off shopping. Scan around the tweets and you will see a mixture of crass random thought and actions. Hold on, can we still qualify it as an action as it was either planned in order to be tweeted about or didn’t even happen but provided a tweet.

Why do people feel the need to tell the world that they have just updated their blog (mea culpa) – ok in this case it’s to drive traffic to the blog. But why oh why tell us that what you’ve just eaten / drank etc. Are we interested? Well the evidence on the site would probably suggest that some of us indeed are.

Would these tweeters have been the people who in another life would have kept diaries of secret thought written in immaculate copperplate – @#prhaps

I’m just off to make a cup of tea – milk and one sugar, be back soon!

Then i’ll update my tweets to let others know about the blog entry.

What do you think?

Is Twitter good or bad for you ?