Boy, I think we all better listen to these college, who have a project to study Twitter this quarter. They know social networking pretty much inside and out – and their verdict on Twitter so far is a big thumbs down.

Wisdom, in this case, seems to be missing in those older than university age.

As a student I feel that Twitter would be more useful to someone actually working in the profession. It is quite similar to instant messaging, but much less private. It could be a great way to keep in touch with colleagues, or get a quick news scoop. Although it seems as if Twitter is mostly mindless chatter. If I needed information from someone I would rather e-mail them instead of putting my comment out for the whole world to see.

@ChrisBoyer – Blog article summarized. If you could listen in to every conversation going on before a football game, would you want to? Less than 140.

Thanks, Amanda, for keeping all this in perspective. We’ve been intrigued to find out that almost none of our teen and 20-something acquaintances (and relatives and kids) have even heard of Twitter.

I’m gonna’ go out on a limb and say from watching those younger tea leaves – Twitter will have a short shelf life.

When it comes to Twitter I believe the only time that this site was interesting to me was during this last election. It was fun to see everyone opinion about the results as they were coming in.

Other then that I find that I can get the same satisfaction out of an instant messaging service as I can from Twitter. It’s an nifty little tooling website but beyond that, I find that I’m just wasting my time on there.

When people on infomercials yell at me about how cool their new miracle sponges are, that’s worthless. When Michael Benidt twitters about his most recent thought-provoking blog post, that’s valuable. When I guy named Ike Pigott and I have conservations about political philosophy and then start writing about raising the quality of political discourse — and I’ve never met Ike in person, only on the Web — that says something positive.

So this is your naive optimist, signing off… (…in order to return to twittering.)

mjk

We have been called “shallow and ignorant” before so we can take it. (And, for those reading this – Mike Keliher is one of our guides to the world of social networking – so we’re not yelling at each other, even though it might sound like it.)

I do believe that too often technology is alienating people from other people. The main use of LinkedIn, SecondLife, Twitter and the rest of the vaunted social networking tools seems to be self-promotion, not relationship building. You use it to build relationships, but here’s a challenge – go to the general Twitter feed and count the serious, valuable ones. I’ll even take you on if you choose the folks you’re following. Most of them are promoting themselves, saying they’re going to lunch, or speaking in code language.

But, I still like you – and value the relationship that we started online.