Is Twitter a valuable tool for communication or is it just a hype?

I actually joined Twitter two days ago so I don’t have a lot experience yet. But I knew about Twitter a while ago, I heard about it on the news, papers, gossip magazines and so on. I just never really had the feeling to join the ‘Twitterhype’ too. Until I went to study ICM and I had to make a Twitter account for research. Now I think it’s quite fun. You can follow famous people around when they are travelling, you can keep up with your friends..just a shame that almost nobody of my friends owns a twitter account..

I think that Twitter started as a hype, but developed and turned out to be a valuable tool for communication. Twitter goes fast, it can reach a lot of people at the same time and it’s all over the world. As soon as you put something on Twitter everybody can read about it immediately. And more important, you hear the news directly from the insiders, not through the tv-news or papers.

For example, the Dutch site ‘www.irannieuws.com’ made a Twitter-account especially designed for the resistance going on in Iran right now. They made ‘#IranElection’ to show the latest news-updates about Iran. Twitter is the most important source for news because every second they get updates from insiders who are in Iran about what’s going on. While the press from abroad doesn’t have any access to the protest actions of the Iranian population, internet became a huge source to keep the ‘outsiders’ informed.

Daily people upload a hundred of photos and videos on ‘youtube’ and ‘flickr’, but messages are uploaded eternally, especially on Twitter.