Twitter is not like Instant Messenging – Here’s the Difference
Two days ago I met the founder of blokal.de in the train from Cebit back to the beautiful city of Hildesheim.
Blokal.de is a new service that summarizes blog posts from your location in a neatly arranged way.
We had an interesting web2.0 kind of conversation so I asked him whether he’s on Twitter.
When he said that he wasn’t really, I still had 10 minutes to persuade him that Twitter is actually quite useful.
His argument was that Twitter is nothing more like instant messenging such as ICQ, MSN, AIM, Skype, just to name a few.
Sorry to be that direct, but this is Bullshit.
Instant messengers can rather be compared to Facebook, which still depends on the way you’re using social networks.
You’re connecting with your friends and if you’re lucky you also got them on Skype to have a nice synchronous conversation from time to time.
And that’s the difference between Twitter and Instant Messenging:
If you’re using Twitter “correctly”, or rather in the way you gain the most benefit from it, you’re not just following your friends, which are “strong ties” if you view it from a sociologist’s perspective, but follow people who are interested in the same topics as you are.
The benefit is actually quite obvious:
These guys are your “weak ties”, meaning that they’re not your buddies, but you’re still connected in a way, namely through Twitter.
In this case because of your common interest.
It is more likely to get new information from these weak ties than from your strong ties, due to a sociological phenonemon called “The Strength of Weak Ties”.
That’s why somebody like Robin Hamman, (a real) social media expert working for Headshift, has already abandoned his RSS-Reader for Twitter. His Twitter audience just does a better job supplying him with relevant, new and interesting information.
If you want to learn more about the benefits of Twitter, you might want to check out my quick and dirty presentation on “How to get the most out of Twitter” I gave at the last Web Monday in Hanover.
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