Twitter: A Social Network or Not?

September 24th, 2009

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Shireen Mitchell made a subtle point at today’s Internet Advocacy Roundtable discussion: people often refer to Twitter as an online social network, but she doesn’t think of it that way. To her, Twitter itself isn’t a social network, it’s a communications channel that lets users create their own social networks.

That makes sense to me, since classic networks require a back-and-forth relationship as on Facebook, but Twitter-following isn’t necessary reciprocal — you may be following Ashton Kutcher but I doubt he’s following you. Connections on Twitter CAN be reciprocal if people follow each other, and even better they can be truly collaborative if many voices participate in a distributed conversation via hashtags or other aggregators. We should just be careful not to confuse the human/social networks with the technology that makes connections possible. We create the relationships; the technology just gives us the chance.

cpd


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  • 1. sanjana  |  March 3rd, 2010 at 7:44 am

    It’s a social networking site only . But i just find one site that’s user-friendly social & professional Networking website of http://www.paracalls.com. It’s operates centrally by using networking tools of Facebook., Twitter and provides a unique IM opportunity sharing instant messaging in Yahoo, Msn, Aol, Gtalk of all IM buddies from this one platform by one click.

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