Waiting in the grocery aisle to buy all my organic vegetables ;) I was in SHOCK & AWE to see this as Time's COVER story. The worlds most respected and wildly circulated news weekly and a magazine which, he who shall not be named wrote some brilliant features for at one time. Anyways, it's largely a fluff piece IMO (being a social media expert in training): Scoble & Louis Gray (et al) have trounced many of the points made time and again here on FriendFeed or maybe they have more to reply as to this piece. So here for your perusal: - The Real sofarsoShawn

"The one thing you can say for certain about Twitter is that it makes a terrible first impression. You hear about this new service that lets you send 140-character updates to your "followers," and you think, Why does the world need this, exactly? It's not as if we were all sitting around four years ago scratching our heads and saying, "If only there were a technology that would allow me to send a message to my 50 friends, alerting them in real time about my choice of breakfast cereal." {and so on and so forth...} - The Real sofarsoShawn

True, it definitely is for the novitiate, but I've recognized most that FFers are higher up on the "Social Media Exper"t scale. - The Real sofarsoShawn

Agreed it leaves a bad first impression. Only last summer, people would give a blank questioning (but interested) stare when you said Twitter but this skipped right past recognition of the service over to an eye-roll reaction. - Jess

I think that reaction is justified, shrugging Twitter aside for the most part, as it is backed up. However, the general thesis/main point the article comes up with in "How it will change are lives" is in the 2nd last para and a huge item that Scoble, Gray et al have failed to explore or touch on that I know of, is with the term they use "end-user innovation" which I like MUCH better and I think is more suitable than the term3rd party applications ..."There are several varieties of this kind of innovation, and they go by different technical names. MIT professor Eric von Hippel calls one "end-user innovation," in which consumers actively modify a product to adapt it to their needs. In its short life, Twitter has been a hothouse of end-user innovation: the hashtag; searching; its 11,000 third-party applications; all those creative new uses of Twitter — some of them banal, some of them spam and some of them sublime. Think about the community invention of the @ reply. It took a service that was essentially a series of isolated microbroadcasts, each individual tweet an island, and turned Twitter into a truly conversational medium. All of these adoptions create new kinds of value in the wider economy, and none of them actually originated at Twitter HQ. You don't need patents or Ph.D.s to build on this kind of platform." - The Real sofarsoShawn