What Twitter Isn't

Amen to Lauren Dugan with her 3 Things Most People Don't Understand About Twitter. Especially to her No. 1 point: Twitter is not a social network. This is why I have preached and preached it is a real-time reporting system. You can fake the interaction that comes with a true social system like Facebook. Twitter's primary strength is distribution, particularly to a mobile network. It's a generic push alert that RSS never really was and the promise of Topix and other web-based "personal newspapers" never delivered in the late 1990s-early 2000s.

You know what -- I can take Lauren down to the Tweetable nugget from her post:

"You don’t sign up for Twitter to socialize – you sign up to find information."

I hesitate to say more -- this is one of those links that requires little elucidation.

But as a shameless reminder of a constant problem I see every day, don't babble on the Twitter and keep in mind that it's reporting, but not always journalism.