Added in 2009 Twitter lists are also a great way to group together and make the tweets you follow more manageable. Since your lists can be private or
public, you can also follow lists themselves, essentially follow the tweets of sets of others without following them individually.
For a few years, we have been using Twitter as an administrative communications tool. We post weather and classroom closing, registration, and student program information. It has been a hard sell to our students and to our faculty. Our faculty members believe they do not have the time to learn new applications. Our students also do not want to learn anything they are not already using. Our increasingly younger students attempt to use Facebook for everything rather than explore other things that may be useful for other purposes. Additionally our IT administration of our collective colleges does not trust the permeability and security of free systems. After our college successfully began using Twitter for weather messages, the system of colleges licensed a pay system that can send emergency messages to cell phones but not much else.
Last year my department cosponsored bringing to speakers Mark Freydenberg and Ben Aslinger, Bentley University professors, to our college for a presentation on Web 2.0 technologies that they use in the classroom. I find fascinating their discussions about using Twitter and cell phones in the classroom as a way to get better and more rapid participation and feedback from their students. Their integration with Twapperkeeper meant
that they could capture and archive Twitter discussions for better analysis of their content and quality. It was disappointing to hear that Twitter used their terms of service to eradicate Twapperkeeper. However, there may other ways to capture the content.
For the past semester, our numbers of Twitter users were at about 17% our official college Facebook Insight numbers. We began using more than a year before Facebook but despite concerted efforts the number of users has not budged by more than one percent.
The future of Twitter is unclear. Twapperkeeper founder John O’Brien believes that Twitter is forcing out helping applications so that they can develop and somehow monetize these aspects themselves. However, I have not seen the results of their efforts so far. The popularity of Facebook dominates the college landscape. Facebook also continues to morph into the social media application that does what all others do. So far the only uncopied advantage Twitter has is that it forces users to be more concise with its 140 character limit. But is that an advantage or simply an anachronistic novelty?
