Surely if people are following a person who has individual views and thoughts then and their twitter handle is their own name, then they should take it with them on the basis of the fact that their followers want to follow them, not their employer.

On the other hand, if a brand has a twitter following, and it is a combination of a number of people talking about the brand, then that stays with the company

Tough one I guess – good debate!

Narelle – I would like to assume – likes to “switch-off” the online (oxymoron?) communication and do it the old-fashioned way – in person, using a voice-box.
The fact I believe she is (failing) to make is that we don’t NEED twitter. Hell, we don’t need email. We don’t need phones.
We DO need food, air and sex (at our most basic level).

Of course without these technologies we wouldn’t be as informed, intelligent or productive (Farmville aside).

So yes – the world we live in has an extraneous amount of fluff and waffle, but it makes it all the more interesting.

Now I’ll go back and read the article because the link from the tweet I received jumped me straight to the comments.

I remember when I first started using email to talk to my friends my parents and their friends all mocked it for being child’s play and that it would never catch on. ‘Why don’t you just call the person?’ and ‘Why not write them a real letter?’.

Social Media technologies like Twitter, Facebook and Friendface are all simply the new electronic mail, the sooner people realise this the better.

It is clear there must be value in the technology, otherwise every other news article wouldn’t quote them as resources for news stories, people wouldn’t be spending 29% of their internet time using them and my Farmville farm wouldn’t be as awesome as it is.

Narelle, get with the program.

Grant.

Real people do eat, drink, read and fuck – some of us even do it while tweeting, spending time online and reading inane blog comments.

In all seriosness: try reading some statistics and case studies of who actually uses this technology, and how the uptake in society is trending.

I’ll leave you with this though: if all the people communicating on Twitter all day are children, someone should tell the @NSWPolice as we just found a MASS of paedophiles!

i had always wondered why i could not adequately donate enough time to my social networks. It was because of my rampant sex life, with an occasional pause to read a book.