Pros and Cons of Web 2: Twitter

Twitter is one of the largest social and media networking sites. It was founded in March 2006; it has over 500 million registered uses and generates around 340 million tweets a day. It has numerous uses and I have taken a few screen shots to demonstrate these uses. This is the iPhone version of the App, it’s much more convenient and user friendly than the website. Millions of tweets are at your fingertips with this App.

This is what the news/tweet feed looks like. When you ‘Follow’ a person, there tweets are posted here for their ‘Followers’ to view. As you can see you can follow almost anyone on twitter, from President Barack Obama to the fashion magazine ‘Vogue’ and musician Tinchy Stryder.

‘Tweets’ are 140 character posts; the user can tweet about anything they like and include other twitter profiles for example if someone was to mention my profile in a tweet they would start it with ‘@HayleyPope_.....’, they can also contain pictures that can be uploaded straight from your iPhone by pressing the camera shape button along the bottom, you can also tell people where you are in a post by pressing the arrow button and your location will be picked up by the GPS function on the iPhone and it can also include ‘hash tags’. Hash tags are like ‘labels’ on this blog. The hash tag is this symbol # in front of a word or phrase; they allow you to view any posts that relate to the hash tag.

When a hash tag is used in lots of tweets by different people they become ‘Trends’. This is what the list of trends looks like. Obviously they change throughout the day as more and more people tweet about different things. Trends allow you to see who else is talking about the topic, for example if I clicked on the #snowmemories trend I would be able to see who is talking about it and what they said about it.

You can also see what everyone is talking about by typing in a word or phrase into the search button. For example as it is a snow day I typed in ‘Snow’ and it takes you straight to a tweet from BBC news about the snow disruption which instantly takes you through to the information at the touch of a button.

This is the profile of Swansea Metropolitan University. Here you can see any updates, upcoming events or any information to do with the University.

This is a great example of how convenient the use of twitter is. Due to the snow, a tweet was produced to inform followers of the uni that it would be closed today. As you can see 14 people have ‘retweeted’ this tweet which passes the message on to even more people.

However with all these great useful features there are some downfalls with the social network. For example it has been known as a gateway for cyber bullying, with users receiving abusive messages and abusive tweets using hash tags so the tweets are made public so everyone using twitter can see the tweet, resulting in humiliation for the victim. However it should be noted that twitter allows users to make their profiles private so they can control who can see their information and tweets, also any abusive messages/tweets can be reported and can result in the bully being blocked from using the social network.