Twitter Potential

Twitter has certainly gotten a good share of the cyber denizens and with its spiffy option that lets one receive messages via mobile phone (still free!) , it’s bound to catch up to a lot more internet users. To this day though, the service is still limited to those who spend a  considerable amount of time online. It has yet to reveal its potential to be useful for other people who just happen to check their email every once in a while.

If you’re in a class of over 160 students (like I am) and urgent last-minute announcements are as normal as water turning into vapor in a summer day, it’s easy to grasp the potential of the service in helping people in large groups. Huge groups like student organizations and classes usually employ setups like text pass (other terms: text brigade and text tree) wherein one person is assigned to send SMS to two or more persons to make sure that everyone gets the message. Of course, the speed of this information transfer is contingent on the amount of time the sender takes to send the message. Let’s not forget that monetary considerations, laziness and absent-mindedness are also probable obstacles.

With Twitter, everyone gets the same message at almost the exact same time - for free. Sure, it will charge everyone 15 pesos for the initial registration, but after that, it’s smooth sailing! In the long run, that 15 pesos will surely pale in comparison with the total expense of a non-Twitter setup. I actually raised this possible mode of information dissemination in the class mailing list but nobody even left a comment (haha).

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