Twitter : The good, bad and ugly

I have been using twitter for about 3 months now. With all my experimentation and observations with twitter, I am convinced that twitter is everything one can think of in the current social network realm. It can be good, bad and even ugly depending on how an individual uses. To illustrate each of the situations, I am sharing my real time experiences with twitter.

Those were the initial days for me with twitter when ‘BarCamp Bangalore 08‘ (#bcb8) event was held during 1st week of March 2009. The venue for this event was our own office! As always, I was curious and excited about the kind of talks that may come up in that event. Since we had a huge cafeteria where the event being conducted, organizers had managed to put up about 5 talks to go simultaneously in various corners of the premises. It was indeed an easy task with the help of twitter hash tag to figure out where to find which topic being talked about and attend the one that meets my interests. That was for the very first time I was witnessing the real time usage of social network media with so much of effectiveness. That wow’ed me and I was a fan of twitter soon after that. I have been using twitter more often after that. This is what I call the ‘Good’ thing about twitter – getting the real time information about something when it is required the most!

In the same event after lunch break, most of the sessions were boring and infact many speakers were making the event a platform to market their incumbent products. I presume those speakers were all working for some start ups and trying to showcase their product in bits and pieces. Due to this most of the event attendees were hopping across the sessions. From nowhere a guy posted a tweet that read something like this ‘sitting next to the cutest gal @ #bcb8’ at 2:20 PM IST on Mar 7th. Thats it… the traffic on #bcb8 started to raise exponentially! Everyone was curious to know who that guy was and how to identify which gal he was talking about. Most of the bar campers had forgotten their actual purpose of being there, but their intent had changed dramatically with that one tweet. It might have been an entertainer for many, but certainly that wasn’t the purpose of coming to bar camp event. This simple tweet defeated the whole purpose of the event for sometime. This very act makes me term twitter as a ‘Bad’ tool at times.

Now coming to the ‘Ugly’ side of twitter. I have been observing the most trending hashtags on twitter since a week or so, #3wordsaftersex, #3wordsduringsex, etc., are a few of those tags to name. Is this right to spread/share such extreme content which is being closely followed by millions of people around the world. This may not be appropriate for all. In my view, this is too much folks. Let us use social network for ‘Good’ and let us use twitter more responsibly. Am I the only non cynical person out here or do you feel the same?