Young whippersnappers

[jethrien]

Ok, I'm officially old. I am boggling over a resume that claims, among other things to be proficient at Twitter.

Twitter.

How exactly is one proficient at Twitter? You can successfully type words? Maybe throw in a "without offending lots of people"? How did this get to be a job qualification?

Do you also have a really sweet MySpace page? Maybe you're the mayor of our museum in FourSquare.

Get off my lawn.

Comments

[mithras03.livejournal.com]

Twitter is ridiculous - I'd like to hope that it's a fad that will go away quickly, but unfortunately, the Library of Congress is now digitally archiving all public tweets (apparently it will be useful for sociological and anthropological future studies of how shallow and self-absorbed we all are), so it likely will be around for a while....

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

I had a debate with a friend about the usefulness/uselessness of preserving Twitter. I agree with you that it has a sociological/anthropological value, though I don't think that's just to preserve our vapidity for the future. I think there's something valuable to Twitter. It, like newspapers, TV shows, etc., is a means for disseminating information, and it does so rapidly. It's fascinating to study what gets picked up on, and by whom, and how widespread the use is. The fact that Twitter, like blogs, has tags so that you can trace who's on the trend and how far that trend goes makes it even easier to search.

Yes, Twitter is vapid a lot of the time. And, like all networking sites, it's rampant with ad-stream Twitter accounts. But I also remember things like the unfolding of support for the dissidents in the Iranian elections, the way people responded to the crisis in Haiti, and I can see the potential for Twitter to be both useful and purposeful. As ever, these things are only so deep as we make them.

[jethrien.livejournal.com]

Problem is, on average, we're not very deep.

[oblvndrgn.livejournal.com]

Twitter has been on the decline over the past year; it gets more usage these days with fewer users, the people who are on it like it, but everyone else thinks it's stupid. On the other hand, the concept of microblogging is almost definitely going to stick around.

As @TrinVix says below, it gets a lot of usage in marketing these days, and has actually been seeing a lot of use in B2B channels, which is sort of fascinating to me. It more or less approximates an RSS feed for some purposes, I suppose. Companies releasing many short communications to their dedicated fan base appear more 'human' as well as get some incredibly targeted messages out to precisely the audience that would buy in.

As for the original topic, given how Web 2.0 is bandied about everywhere these days, listing comfort with social media in general seems like a fine thing for a somewhat techie person to list on a resume just because it means they're cued into tech trends. Twitter specifically? Still dumb.

[jethrien.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but it's not a tech position, either. It's a contract-writing position.