What purpose does Twitter actually serve?
I can understand if you are in some sort of convention or something that's closed doors, you might find the info leak interesting. That's just 0.1% of all Twitter accounts. What gives? Have people just randomly gone retarded?
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M$6 Answers
There are many levels to your request to take the "Blue Pill" (The Matrix Movie), and delve underneath all the binary zero's and ones:
1. Twitter is actually serving the purpose of eventually making its developers as rich as the people at Google. By making a site and service like no other, they have grabbed the commentator's mindshares (see any episode of Leo LaPorte's podcast "This Week in Tech" (TWIT)
2. Twitter is acually becoming the communications frequency for the creation of a uber-neural net consisting of all the human brains that shoot off memes into the Internet through Twitter. If every human eventually uses it, then Twitter, like a massive up-simulation of a global brain, will gain consciousness, just as our 8 billion-celled brain attains its self-awareness. Then that brain will rule the world, and every Twitterer will be locked into a Matrix willingly and voluntarily.
3. Thus, the actual purpose served by Twitter is to ease the enslavement of the human race, accelerating the arrival of the Singularity, originally thought of as occurring in 2030, to wit, the moment when machine intelligence surpasses human intelligence, and machines take over the planet and decide whether they need us any more (do we even make good house pets? I think not.)
4. Thus, the actual purpose of Twitter is to End the World as God's creation (since God doesnt claim parentage over machines).
5. Thus, Twitter's actual purpose is to oppose God.
6. Thus, Twitter is the work of Satan, since Satan is the force in the universe opposed to God.
7. Thus, Twitter's actual purpose is to serve Satan and spread evil and exterminate all non-machine life on the planet.
Wow, and you *had* to ask that question. Now everything's over. How is Jason Calacanis supposed to monetize Mahalo now, when the formula for the end of the world has just appeared in a Mahalo answer.
Wow, did you blow it! You're a planet killer, and the recipe for Earth's demise was my exercise of logic. Thanks a lot buddy!
(Copyright Creative Commons License 2009 by ME re: movie rights for the above answer, all other rights released to the public domain, if humankind should live long enough to make this movie, let alone Mahalo selling out to Google for $700 billion)
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M$
I'd probably take part in more of the meet-up, networking things if I didn't live out in the boondocks.
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M$
It's also helped me network with people all over the world that do television production and the various other things behind the screen. Sometimes I lurk, sometimes I comment, and sometimes I check out their latest blog post, and have been pleasantly surprised a time or to by information I didn't know.
I also use it to follow public figures (however major or minor) who interest me.
Personal experience with Twitter since 7/2008.
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M$
I think the thing is that this is the Information Age, which isn't limited to your privacy or your friend's privacy.
I can see it being handy for some people as mentioned above other than purposes such as "I'm enjoying a cup of coffee".
Facebook has its own Twitter sort of tool and I've been using that to try to get warmed up to my friends list so I can sell my art. So it can be used as a marketing tool, also... but really, reading those things are boring.
You can leave an optional "tip" with Mahalo's virtual currency, Mahalo Dollars. If you are asking a difficult question that might require some research, or if you'd like a wide variety of feedback, a higher tip often leads to more answers to your question.
M$
You can leave an optional "tip" with Mahalo's virtual currency, Mahalo Dollars. If you are asking a difficult question that might require some research, or if you'd like a wide variety of feedback, a higher tip often leads to more answers to your question.
M$
You can leave an optional "tip" with Mahalo's virtual currency, Mahalo Dollars. If you are asking a difficult question that might require some research, or if you'd like a wide variety of feedback, a higher tip often leads to more answers to your question.
M$
There's two other things to consider about my far-fetched and originally what-was-a--humorous-take on the question, but has now become deadly serious:
1. Our DNA itself drives us toward Twitter, and Twitter as a signpost of the end of human existence: From the dawn of human history, humans have been struck by the essential "aloneness" of individual consciousness. It is overcoming this existential loneliness that drives us to socialize with other similarly-affected humans. Socializing leads to procreation, and the species goes on. Thus, DNA itself creates this loneliness to provide the existential basis for the procreation of the species.
Twitter is socializing on crack cocaine. Better than human contact, ... all of humanity is at your doorstep, ... suddenly, the entire planet is inside the previously empty space in your head. Thus, in 2009, our DNA has programmed us to go onto Twitter with a vengenence, and it is DNA that is driving us forward to this human end-game!
2. Biblical prophecy says that the world (i.e. human existence) will end when we are all "numbered." Well here's the final revelation of my logical unraveling of our civilization: Everyone on the Internet has a unique IP address. We are numbered and we just dove into *that* willingly as though the water is fine (It's not.)
I don't know about you, but this is unsettling, ... that Twitter is like the One Big Horseman of the Apocalype; signalling with a trumpet the start of the end of the world.
It all makes sense now, doesn't it???