All the little birds on J-Bird St. Love to hear the robin goin' tweet tweet tweet

Twitter has made a cameo appearance throughout the semester in class, but I never really understood what it was until today. Before the power point presentation, I just thought it was used to alert its users to breaking news, and depending on who's twitter feed you are following, it can.
When I visited twitter.com, the first thing I saw were testimonials about it on the bottom of the Web site. One member, point_chevalier, said, "When I first started doing it, I thought, 'geez, not another website to worry about updating and checking', but now I'm glad I did it." A concern many of us had in class.

Twitter says:

Twitter is a free service that lets you keep in touch with people through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

But that isn't supposed to be considered its main reason for being.

Ideally, I think it's supposed to be something that promotes citizen and professional journalism alike, and provides instantaneous sharing of information about breaking news.

I have issues with Twitter though... to me, it's like a delayed chat, where people can say pretty much anything they please and not have to do the work to back up what they say with evidence.

I don't deny that some of the "tweets" can be highly entertaining, for example Fake Rahm Emanuel's twitter feed, which I started looking at yesterday after class, is hilarious. However, it's vulgar, and it's not exactly news worthy for the most part.


I really like Grist's twitter feed though. Grist is a news publication on environmental news. It doesn't just copy and paste it's headlines as tweets, but it does give a short bit about what it is reporting on. I think I'm slowly starting to be compelled toward environmental journalism, so this particular twitter feed is a winner in my eyes.

And last but not least, I think twitter is a great place to exploit celebrity news, which Jezebel does on her twitter feed. However, she does also tweet about legit. news such as Hillary's new post. Because much of celebrity news can be crude and crass... keeping it short and sweet is probably for the best, and twitter forces the messages to be short, if not sweet.