I believe that Twitter is the beginning of an entirely new communication paradigm.  Try to look beyond the hype to the practicality and you might see what I mean.

Five reasons why Twitter is better than a phone:

  1. It permits time shifting.  Just like your TiVo at home, Twitter permits asynchronous messaging.  You can send and receive messages regardless of what the connectivity status of the other person is.  There is no missed calls or busy signals.
  2. You don’t need to know their phone number or email address.  So long as they used a portion of their name as their username, you can search the entire Twitter population in milliseconds to get their address.  It is like having a global address book for the world.
  3. It is multi-point.  By using Twitter in combination with any number of software packages or add-ons permits other’s tweets (the messages sent on Twitter) to get routed in parallel to any other micro blogging service you use, your cellular phone, your email, and even to other Twitterers.
  4. It is faster.  I can write 100 character message and send it faster than I can dial a 10 digit number and wait for the other person to answer for sure.  Try it sometime.  You might be surprised.
  5. It can provide multimedia in addition to just voice.  Using add-ons, you can send anything from pictures to video to audio along in a tweet.

This was not an effort to produce a list of all the ways that Twitter was superior to telephones, but just to highlight five off of the top of my head.  I am pretty sure that we are seeing something revolutionary in communications being born here.  Take note of the number of business cards that are starting to include a Twitter handle alongside an email address. Twitter is better than the phone for sure!

Do you use Twitter?  How do you like it?  Is it better than phones for you?  Better than email?

By the way, my Twitter user name is @Scott_Coughlin and the site is @ITThought.

That is my Information Technology Thought of the Day (ITTOD) for May 25, 2009 ©Scott Coughlin .

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