As founding editor of ReadWriteWeb, every weekend I’ll pick out 2-3 posts from the past week which I thought were particularly good and worth highlighting. Last week Marshall Kirkpatrick, RWW’s lead writer and VP Content Development, wrote an intriguing analysis of the impact Twitter has had on our culture. The basis of the post was a media suggestion that the Twitter founders receive the Nobel Peace Prize. It inspired Marshall to outline exactly what makes Twitter such a phenomenon. You can click here to read the whole post, which I encourage you to do. I’ve also pasted a few highlights below…
Marshall wrote:
The creators of Twitter deserve big accolades because they have invented what could be compared to a newly discovered, very usable, radio-wave frequency. It’s a new plane of communication. It’s truly world changing.
Twitter isn’t like SMS text messages because the visibility of Twitter messages isn’t limited to a finite set of intended recipients. Twitter messages are both personal and public, targeted and broadcast, experienced individually and available for aggregate analysis by anyone who cares to process them.
Twitter is synchronous and asynchronous. It’s for one on one, small group and very large group conversations. All at once!
It’s a place for serendipitous discovery of the unexpected and it’s a place you can go to find answers to very specific questions.
Perhaps most importantly, it’s a tool that lets messages leap from person to person, from one friend network to another, in a matter of minutes, all over the world. Email enables that as well, but there’s honestly a significantly greater amount of friction to sending an email than there is retweeting a tweet.
It does all this and yet it’s just a box that asks “what are you doing?”
