DISQUS

Aerocles · 7 months ago

The thing about twitter is that, despite being built as a social medium, it's design is so minimalist, it lends itself to other uses, such as search. Facebook is so heavily saturated with inborn tools and feeds, messages, wall posts, events...it's restricted itself to social use, the main reason why advertising on facebook hasn't really paid off yet. The beauty of twitter is that it can be anything we want - A social Forum, A Crowdsourcing/Seach Engine or more. By basing the design in open conversation, you can take any concept and impose it on twitter, effectively shifting the focus of your initial concept toward one based on dialogue & user generated content - Like twitter is doing with search. But this premised can, theoretically, be applied to any paradigm!

Eric · 7 months ago

I rarely use the search function - except to follow a couple of #tags. Not that sure Twitter search returns the sort of information that I look for.

I do use Twitter to communicate & meet others.

Walter · 7 months ago

I use twitter to search how people are using dirty words. I'll punch in "rim job" or "Dirty Sanchez" just to see how the last 20 people in the world decided to use those terms. Quite fun.

Tony Searight · 7 months ago

Twitter is both, Social Medim and Search Engine.

Ken. · 7 months ago

Neither..
First of all, Twitter is in itself a terrible creation. My opinion is that Twitter is nothing more than a cyber herd movement with a lesser purpose than facebook or multiply.
A site that is built around one question, “What are you doing?” is potentially one of the most clever creations, but it seems to be geared towards people without important things to do except update the world on their whereabouts.
While cyber technology continues to advance, it’s consequently robbing humanity of the human relations.

- A concerned Engineer -www.EngineeringDaily.net

Hessie Jones · 7 months ago

Twitter is great because it combines search with social but provides bookmarketing capabilities as well. I love the versatility of the environment that allows very cool apps designed to crowdsource, contest, aggregate conversation threads, true monitoring by key word(s), organize directory of users by profiling etc. Because it is truly information-based, I guess the next step is figuring out how to organize all this wealth of content

rampantheart · 7 months ago

I have voted for the third option that says Twitter is both a social medium and a search engine.