Twitter, twitter everywhere...

I have 6 followers on Twitter at the moment and only three of them classify for “real” person status. I’m fairly sure one is just a spam bot because I have never had anything to do with a bankruptcy firm, let alone one from California. I haven’t really used twitter very much until this class needed it. I had an account that I left alone for nearly a year. All my friends are active on Facebook and there are only two people on both my pages but neither one is active.  

The site is a great way to look at what celebrities are doing and projects they enjoy. I saw a clip of Joseph Gordon-Levitt on Sesame Street teaching the word “reinforce” because he posted it. I’d have never seen the clip without Twitter. Neil Patrick Harris has been doing videos called “Neil’s Puppet Dreams” (NSFW) that Nathan Fillion tweeted about because they did one together. It’s been a great spot to catch new Hollywood gossip or videos that I would never see till months and months later. I do have to be careful with how much time I spend on Twitter as I’ll just keep flicking back because I’ve started reading someone’s profile like a book.

I suppose that is the real risk with Twitter. As Re pointed out in her blog post, the Library of Congress is keeping any tweet that has been sent since the site started and is passing the information out to researchers or interested parties. The paranoid part of me flips out at this. “Osterberg wrote that the library has completed digitally archiving all of the tweets it currently possesses and is now working on how to best make them available to the public. The library already has received about 400 requests from researchers all over the world looking into topics ranging from the rise of citizen journalism to tracking vaccination rates to predicting stock market activity.” (CNN.com). It’s a little silly when you think of it. It’s a social media site that is visible to anyone the world over and anything online will stay there forever. It’s one thing to have these tweets archived on the company’s servers but appears a great deal more worrisome to know they are printed at the Library of Congress. I can close my account, delete every tweet and erase myself from their servers but not from the library. That means the silly little tweets I’ve sent are no longer under my complete control. I can say this will change the way I use the site.

On the other hand, something I wrote is IN THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS!!!!! How cool is that for a writer?!?

http://www.cnn.com/2013/01/07/tech/social-media/library-congress-twitter