Peter Suderman, writing on one of my favorite blogs, The American Scene, has raised some questions about Twitter and its usefulness. Among Suderman’s criticisms was the way people follow those who are following them, causing numbers to inflate. He mentions a familiar phenomena (if you’ve ever run into “institutional” Twitter accounts) where they only follow other institutions and use Twitter as an RSS aggregator. Suderman also says that the Twitter site itself lacks many features (such as groups) that drive people to desktop applications.Beyond being interesting, Suderman’s article, in the context of this Web site, draws the question, “what is government doing using this service?” It seems crippled and bloated — not the right tool for the job.
The reality, of course, is that is the only, or rather, the most popular, tool for the job. The “follow wars,” as I’ll call them, were originally seen as progress for the service as a whole. Government posters should be proud if their tweets attract a few thousand followers — it means that they’re doing something right.
On the other hand, we’ve already discussed the outcomes of only following other institutions.
It may be an imperfect union — government and Twitter — but a wrench can be used as a hammer in a pinch. As government learns more about the concept of Twitter (not to mention the rest social media), and its advantages and limitations, there is a possibility that it will be moved to create a social media service of its own.
