To kill boredom, I was playing with Twitter Search and the advanced version to figure out how good and useful it is. Out of curiosity, I punched in the keywords ‘how to use Twitter’ into the search box and to my surprise, there are quite a number of users who simply don’t understand what is Twitter is about or how to use to world’s number one micro-blogging platform. In my mind, I was wondering whether these people have an IQ of below 80 or is it that Twitter isn’t a user-friendly platform after all.
Originally, Twitter was a simple SMS service which allows users to tell their friends, family member or co-workers what they are doing. People can reply to each other updates and this is called two-way communication. However, as Twitter begins to gain popularity and an increasing number of users started joining the social networking service, the traditional way of relating to others what you are currently doing has been changed tremendously because of the users’ style of posting updates. It has become from a simple ‘What are you doing?’ platform to a website that is ‘strictly for bloggers, webmasters and celebrities’. They don’t use it as a communication tool, instead bloggers merely make use of Twitter to promote their articles to a wider community whereas celebrities used it to increase their fame on the Internet. As time passed, creative users start to invent their own ways of managing their Twitter accounts by not following the original boring idea of finding out what your friends are actually doing.
As a result, Twitter turned out to become a ‘confusing’ platform. On its homepage, Biz Stone and Co. states that Twitter is a “What are you doing service?”. However, this can be contradicted from the fact that most of the tweets posted by users are actually links to the latest buzz on the Internet. Thus, new users would be confused about what Twitter is? A SMS service to tell people what you are doing or a social sharing platform?
From any healthy 10-year-old kid’s perspective, I’m sure that he or she would be able to use Twitter within a few minutes without the need to teach him or her. Twitter is really simple service unlike Facebook which has lots of functions and applications. If anyone be it a young kid or an old man knows how to post a tweet and follow their friends, so what’s the main reason behind those technogically-savvy adults who say that they are “learning how to use Twitter”. Well, they are simply confused by what is Twitter all about.