Twittering Time Away

Twitter is another tool that I have simply because I needed to for a course. I believe that there are very few people in the world from whom I need updates every few minutes. Well, except, of course, my kids. (They tell me it is easier to update their status via Twitter than via Facebook.)  Anyway, there must be lots of people out there with interesting lives worthy of 140 characters of commentary because Twitter reached the 20 Billion tweets mark today. That's 20,000,000,000!

However, I have talked to other people who find it useful and now that I've done some more investigating, I can see their point. You can keep up-to-date on news by following any of the major networks. In countries where news is censored, Twitter allowed residents to voice their opinions; a great example is the election in Iran. My local newspaper now allows you to follow the classified ads via Twitter. While I don't care what Ashton Kutcher or Larry King are doing every minute, these other news items are worth following. I also discovered that Twitter may be helpful for professional reasons. Did you know that you can follow Library Journal and LJ Book Reviews via Twitter!