Photo by Mfilej, Flickr Creative Commons
Justin brought to my attention this article from the Huffington Post about the eminent death of Digg by Twitter. To be honest, I have never really liked Digg to begin with.
To me, a lot of the stories that make up its front page are boring and uninteresting. At the same time, I’m just getting acquainted with Twitter. It’s funny how inoffensive it looks from afar (or maybe I need to reset my screen resolution), but once you get to interact with it, it morphs into… something much, much bigger. My initial thought when I first looked into Twitter was one of confusion. How the hell do people manage to digest so much information so fast? Being on Twitter makes you feel connected to a whole new level, as if you were handling 4 mobile phones at once, or all your friends were chatting you up at the same time on Gmail. Fortunately, the more time you spend on the service, the quicker you get at filtering out information. It brings you headlines in real-time and uses your friend’s authority to propagate them. Will Twitter bring us closer to the so-called democratization of information we’ve heard so much about?
One element that was not very much talked about in the article is the portability of Twitter. This is a huge advantage over Digg. The 140 word format of Twitter along with its small file size makes it ideal for mobile phones and such devices. I can easily picture myself tweet on the go, more so than on a computer. As iPhones and other smart phones will grow in popularity, so will Twitter. Geosocialisation tools such as Brightkite have a sunny futur ahead of them.
On a SEO and Social Media point of view, I believe Twitter is a powerful tool to gather up communities and build quality links, even though I still haven’t had much experience with it as of yet. I have set myself a goal to have Twitter on my (still lightweight) tool belt within the next few weeks. We’ll see how things turn up to be!