The Business of Twitter is Business, Twitter or the conscience of the world

      Although Twitter is very popular in the United States, it is not so much in France: French people post less than 1% of all the tweet. Twitter was created in 2006 by three Californians, its purpose being to allow its users to "discover what’s happening right now, anywhere in the world". Indeed, each user can post a tweet at anytime, that its creators define as "a short burst of inconsequential information" that can be read by anyone.

   To me, Twitter is a concept that is typically american and that may explain why it is not so popular here in France. For instance, the users only have 140 characters to express themselves which reminds me of the text messages (or Short Message Service) when we only had limited phone plans. Using Twitter then requires us to be synthetic as well as catching. 
Contrary to the French language, English, and especially American English is a language that I consider as being more adaptable and handy. It is then perfect for the Twitter format since it allows us to get to the point just like the pragmatic attitude of the United States and generally of its inhabitant.

But for us, French-speakers whose language and syntax is more complex, and leads us to make long sentences, this may appear quite difficult. How to sum up a thought that we would like to develop thanks to complex sentences in only twenty words? Moreover, Twitter being an international network with its own jargon, most of its user choose to tweet in English.

  


   The principal use of Twitter is probably for communication purpose, so much so that  universities started to encouraging the use of Twitter in their marketing and communication courses. Besides, any company and any star worthy of the name has to have a Twitter. With 14 millions « little monsters » on Twitter, Lady Gaga aka Mother Monster is the star who has the most followers. But the special mention goes to Ashton Kutcher aka the star who seems to be spending most of his time on social networks. 

   But what fascinates me is how fast the information spread. Thanks to Twitter, I learned the death of Amy Winehouse and Steve Jobs for instance, before it was on the news. Thanks to Twitter I was also able to observe the numerous messages of support during the Arab Spring revolutions or the earthquake in Japan.

   Therefore, Twitter appears to be the reflection of the public opinion. A constant flood of thoughts and ideas in real time; like a worldwide conscience that can be explored at any time. Just by typing a name, a place or an event in the searchbar, one is able to know what the world thinks about it. Just by observing the trending topics, one is able to know what interests the world at that very moment. Twitter can then be considered as a giant bush telegraph. But as we all know, the starting message is very different from the arriving one. Moreover, a lot of tweets and retweets have already caused misunderstandings because a lot of people forget to check the timelines or misinterprete them. 

    Journalists also started tweeting. It became another opportunity to publish real time information, to be the first one to publish a piece of information. But we should be very cautious with that before Twitter ends up being a flood of information which sources are not verified, only for the sake of the scoop. 

Absolute B.