The Trouble with "The Trouble with Twitters"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN2HAroA12w

If you refer to a previous blog post--http://walkingcharley.blogspot.com/2009/09/i-am-under-impression-that-memex.html

--you will see that new technologies that offer new way of recording and transformating information take a while to be learned by users.  Essentially, they are forming new literate practices.  The user must do cost benefit analysis to determine if learning the new practice is worth it or not.  

In the case of Twitter, users began using the system in different ways to fit their needs.  You can see this entry for detail on this matter:  http://walkingcharley.blogspot.com/2009/05/web-20-usability-and-participatory.html.

But users must also discover how the system can be useful.  As the video illustrates, this can sometimes be hard to discover.  But, tell the voters in Iran that Twitter is not useful.  So far, it has been the fastest news source ever.  When there were gas shortages in the Carolinas,  people would let others know which stations had gas on Twitter.  At this point, we just getting to the point seeing how blogging and social networking technologies will be useful to the individual.