In the article “How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live”, the author Steven Johnson writes about Twitter and its impact on how we live. Twitter is a social network site that lets you make status updates with up to 140 characters. You follow celebrities or people you know and tweet about your daily activities, how you are feeling, what you are eating, etc. The author says Twitter is so interesting because it gives you a glimpse of someone’s daily routine, and gives you information without even having to ask. The author predicts Twitter will become addictive and a whole new distraction on the Internet.
In the article Johnson writes about a conference he had earlier in the year called Hacking Education. It was a six-hour conversation about the future of schools. During this conference a side conversation was taking place on Twitter, anyone who wanted to speak about the event through Twitter included #hackedu. Hash tags are used on Twitter creating a room of tweets regarding whatever is hash tagged. Eventually word of the conversation on Twitter about the future of schools got out and other people started joining in the conversation, following the #hackedu thread. This shows how fast word gets out about a topic using Twitter, compared to other social networks. The hash tag is a major factor of Twitter that widely separates it from other sites such as Facebook.
Another factor of Twitter that separates it from other social networks is the fact that you can share links, discussions, posts, and videos through it. It is easy to spread the word using Twitter. The social aspect of Twitter, live searching, and link sharing on are three elements that make Twitter a unique social network. The author writes that Twitter can become a better search source than Google. If someone was to search a subject using a hash tag, they could find more recent facts/links about the subject rather than using Google’s older links. Political debates