Erstellt am: 21. 3. 2011 - 11:14 Uhr
Today's Webtip: Alain de Botton
Twitter is five today. Yay.
In the last five years it's gone from a scrappy start-up extending SMS, to a micro-blogging juggernaut that has quite literally helped change the world.
But it's still surprisingly hard to explain to outsiders. A recent class in Twitter for journalists (I was the student, not the teacher) still left a lot of the non-tweeters with one burning question: Just what the heck is it good for.
Unfortunately it's a question that most people have to eventually answer for themselves. Some people still use it to keep the world up to date on the status of their gastrointestinal tracts, while others prefer to find 140 character descriptions of their neighbors bad habits. There are those who like to lurk, silently following the windings of the world, and a few who use it as the foundation for their personal news service.
It has spawned a TV show, generated dubious publicity for one promi-paar and has helped keep the BieberFieber afire.
And at least one person is using it to teach.
Alain de Botton , a man who seems to have made a career out of simplifying complex issues for popular consumption, has taken that trend to the next level. In just 7 tweets he has summed up the whole of western cultures political philosophy.
Or, rather, he tried: twitter.com