ITM501 MoD 3 SLP the internet as social media - Essay Example

It is interesting to note that Twitter was never designed with the intention of being used as a social media website. It was primarily designed as an instant messaging communication platform with a client company. The company touts of having approximately 140 million active users as in 2012 and being the ninth/tenth “most visited” website (Bullas) (Webneel, 2013). Its initial success is attributed to the novelty of the platform which came as а breakthrough from others such as Facebook and Orkut.

Over the period, Twitter has added features such as expandable tweets and Twitpics to enhance user experience. I found the Twitter platform relatively straightforward and simple. This is because of the company’s usage of features such as the Follow and Tweet buttons, search option and “embeddable Tweets” (Ellin, 2011, Twitter Developers, 2013). The feature of embeddable tweets is particularly useful as it allows users to convey a brief story through a “line of code” or keywords that can help others follow the story by searching for it anywhere on the web (Ellin, 2011).

I was able to generate fair amount of political and general discussion regarding recent economic events in U.S by simply quoting the key words and getting connected with others to shared views on similar topics. Also, these short stories compare with Facebook’s status updates although the reference properties of the former make it easy to share the stories/updates. Twitter also offers tremendous support for bloggers including its own domain “Twitter Blogs” with RSS feeds support and easy integration of Twitter content onto blogs using the embeddable tweets.

However, my use of embeddable tweets was still fairly simple considering that I am not a blogger and cannot possibly use it on platforms other than Twitter and Facebook. Furthermore, in order to counter its competitors including LinkedIn, Twitter has introduced “Twellow” which allows people to search for other people on Twitter via their expertise or occupations. I found this particularly useful for finding my colleagues and connecting with them on Twitter. It also allowed me to find old friends (with whom I hadn’t recently been in touch) and connect with them.

Various categories including Recreation, Entertainment, Culture, Computers, Sports and Government are listed which allows users of similar taste to group themselves and share content (iEntry, 2013). This is a useful application of the famous phrase “birds of feather flock together”. However, the Twitter experience was a bit more complex than my experience with Facebook as it took a lot of time making sense of the features. At the very least, discovering how to actually tweet was complex as tags had to be used for creating the story.

Furthermore, it was monotonous to merely tweet and not engage in other interactive content such as games. On the other hand, the ‘twit pic’ option compares with other platforms such as Instagram by offering the latest ‘trending’ pictures (Twitpic, Inc., 2013). I was able to view several personal life photographs of my favorite celebrities such as Kim Kardishan’s baby- North. With just one click, I was able to view all photographs uploaded by Kim Kardishan on her official twitter account along with the