Twitter: Useful or a Waste of Time?

It seems like everybody is talking about it. Twitter: a site that can be about everything, or a site that can be about nothing. Before I started using Twitter, I thought of it much like blogging. I thought of it as a site full of mindless chatter, and consisting of nothing of substantive matter. I pictured the average 'tweeter' as (not to be sexist) a typical teenage girl who craves attention. However when I signed up for my Twitter account, I never thought I would use it as much as I do.

I first used Twitter the way I thought it was supposed to be used; I posted statuses about my life that probably no one cared about. I tweeted a few more times, and then I forgot about Twitter for a few months. Then I logged back on to give it another chance, and I have been hooked ever since. Users of the website need to find their own purpose for using the website, following people, and tweeting. My purpose for using Twitter is for politics, and particularly political gossip and news. I follow many elected officials, and political journalists and news agencies including several U.S. Senators, and U.S. Representatives, Chuck Todd of NBC news and the Huffington Post along with many others. Some of their Tweets are very interesting and are published faster than on mainstream media sites.

Twitter is also useful to see what people are talking about; and people love to talk about politics. It's especially useful to see what people are talking about when something is happening rapidly. The first time I started searching what people were talking about was during the recent midterm election. I am a Democrat and passionately supported Democratic candidates, and I wanted to see if the Pennsylvania statewide Democratic candidates were going to win. I knew that the voter turnout was key in Philadelphia. If the turnout was very high it was more than likely that the Democrats were going to win statewide. So while I was in line at the local Subway wanting to know how the turnout was, I took out my smart phone, went to Twitter.com and searched "Voter turnout in Philly." What I found were tweets from voters at the polling stations talking about the long lines in Philly. It turns out that the turnout in Philly was very high, however it was not enough to carry the Democrats in the polls.

According to a Pew Research Study, about 8% of Americans who use the internet also use Twitter and of that 8%, 55% of Twitter users post links to news stories and 10% of that 55% do this more than once a day. Twitter is a very news conscious website, and I would say that many of the posts I read about political gossip are accurate even though they are not checked. I have not run into a problem with them in the past. Check out the rest of this survey.

Twitter is useful if you know what to look for.

Check out my Twitter!