Week 4 Reflections

For this week our mini project was to investigate twitter.  Many of my classmates made the point that they really didn't see any point for twitter for an average user.  They equated the service as something that allowed a person to shout out that they just ate breakfast or took a shower.  In other words a useless service.  I would tend to agree with them for the most part, especially if the service is used in that manner.  But I made the point that Twitter has allowed some amazing events to occur such as live tweeting from the revolutions that were occurring in Libya and Egypt.  Even something not as extreme as that can occur with tweets from the Occupy Wall Street movement allow a view into the event for those who are not part of it or can not be there themselves.  I think that something like Twitter has to be judged on what it can be used for rather then what it is used for a majority of the time.  To try and provide a similar example look towards Google.  If you let the auto finish complete some of your searches you will find that people use google for some inane things or at least very, very, strange things.  Google is the most powerful search tool that humanity has created so far and is capable of performing some awesome tasks.  Yet people are searching for cats playing piano pictures.