Twitter changes users name
A service I once used alot, and could see myself using again, if more friends used it, is twitter. Twitter, is a small tool that you post what you’re currently doing, and it sends the information out to your friends who are following your feed. Nothing that useful until your friends get up to a critical mass.
One useful thing that has been done with twitter though, has been conference "casts" if you will. A large conference called TechCrunch40 was going on the past two days, and a group of individuals got the twitter user name of techcrunch40. Therefore people could follow their take on the conference, only problem for the conference was they were being honest, and mostly mocking the presenters and the conference itself. Then randomly, after this twitter account had quite the following (almost 300 people in two days) Ev Williams, twitters founder, changed their name to nottechcrunch40.
That kind of thing might fly with your buddies, but if you’re trying to create a tool to be used by a critical mass you shouldn’t change a users name (not delete, change) because you don’t like what they are saying (Williams is on the board for TechCrunch40). The users said nothing offensive, and although I was not at the conference, I would imagine many of the things said were true. I agreed from what I had read online and what they were saying.
Ev has made alot of very smart moves (Blogger and Odeo) and I think twitter has the potential to be something very useful. I hope to one day make a third of the great decisions Ev has made. This move, however, is something that should not happen if you’re trying to create something on a large scale.
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Comments
I was at a tech conference for educators in Shanghai a few weeks ago. Great conference. They used Twitter and projected the comments on the screen behind the presenter. People were rude and inconsiderate to the presenters. While I see value in Twitter, I wouldn’t use it in that forum. I just started using wikis in my classroom for collaborative online assignments. It is still in the developmental stage, but the kids are enjoying this format. Kimzey Wiki: http://kimzeywiki.wetpaint.com/
I found Twitter useful in large groups, but as you mentioned above, most people used it to monk the presenters. More people were reading Twitter and laughing at the responses than listening to the presenter.
Sorry for the late comment here, but the big issue is that by changing the user’s name, he essentially confirmed everything they were saying.