February 2007 Archives

In this week's episode of ETS talk, Cole, Allan and I talk to D'Arcy Norman, edtech blogger extraordinaire. We talk about strategies for driving adoption of new technology across the higher ed institution, not just the early adopters.

Today I got a tweet from Christian asking why we aren't using an IRC chat room instead of twitter. This is a question I have wondered as well, because in most cases the way we have been using twitter around the office is no different than IRC. Everyone is using twitterific on their computer to talk to largely the same group of people. We could do the same thing if we all just joined the same IRC channel.

Twitter is very different from IRC though.

Twitter keeps a log of your messages on their website, constituting a blogini.

Twitter seems to be built foremost around SMS. The idea is that users can be plugged into the twitter stream whenever and wherever they want.

Conversations are difficult in twitter. I have friends and followers from many different social groups. I have friends, ITS staff, people I used to work with at World Campus, as well as some people I know from reading their blogs. If I start having a conversation within any of these groups, all the others hear only my side of the conversation. I am not sure what the etiquette should be around conversations.

Social Networking: Twitter has the whole friend of a friend thing going for it.

Conclusion: If ten people all join twitter, all become friends with each other, and they only use the web or twitterific for updates, then it is probably easier and more appropriate to just use an IRC channel. They are not taking advantage of the unique nature of twitter.