WHILE MANY people abhor Twitter for its 140-character banality, I see Twitter's tightly-constrained text formats as nanoblogging in practise. As with many blogs, many entries on Twitter are more boring than a listing of what people had for breakfast. But for every transmitter, there is a receiver and in the case of many people using Twitter, those receivers are friends and family. My mom would like to know what I had for breakfast. She doesn't want to go to a computer to see those details. She wants to get the information on her phone. That means running over to the States and setting her up on a data plan friendly to text messaging. Then at least two of her sons should send her little tweats to let her know how things are several time zones away.
There is nothing earth-shattering about staying in touch but there is something valuable about being able to say "Hi!" to mom without paying to do it. Extend this easy communication to the less-developed parts of the world and you have the beginning of another low-cost social network.
As Euan Semple points out, "Although blogging has become so popular that the word has made it into the Oxford Dictionary, only a few privileged Africans have a blog. This is related to fact that computer access is very limited and of the few computers available, even fewer have Internet connectivity."
Semple thinks "the launching of Twitter provides a good alternative considering that the use of mobile phones is much higher than that of computers. In Malawi for example, there are about 50,000 Internet users against about 700,000 mobile phone users out of a population of about 12 million."
Mom doesn't live in Malawi but her IT knowledge is no better than an African villager's. She knows her way around a mobile phone's keypad and that's good enough to become a full-fledged nanoblogger while using Twitter as your connection point.
Euan Semple -- "Twitter and the digital divide"
I am twitter.com/topgold.
