Twitter reminds me of a dumbed-down social networking site. The simplified design only allows for status updates and subscribing to see friends’ updates. The best use of the website is as a form of RSS reader. I started my account because one of my favorite blogs had started posting up-to-the-minute news to the site. As a tool for connecting with friends online, it is nearly useless. Many times, it serves only to provide you with mundane details of people’s lives. The 140 character limit makes it hard to post good quotes.

My roommate was one of the few people I bothered to add during my short time using Twitter. I would watch him type into his computer and then get up to leave the room. Seconds later I would get an update telling me he was out of the room, something I already knew. Oftentimes, my twitter status was the same as my status in my chat client and all of the people who could see my twitter were also on my buddy list.

The whole idea of Twitter seems redundent in the current social networking market. It really brings nothing new to the table except for fewer features. The streamlined design was appealing, but it was not worth remembering another set of login information.

With the advent of an open-source, consumer-driven economy, is the political world the next frontier for the wiki generation? There is already a blog on the White House website run in President Obama’s name. Shouldn’t a ‘democracy’ such as the United States use every tool that’s available to give as many citizens as possible access to the political process?

I’m not suggesting that we start electing computers into key positions. However, there are two very logical uses of the internet in politics.

1. Campaigning: Within twenty years, a presidential candidate will run a campaign using solely web tools. Speeches will be made using videos on YouTube. Debates will be held in the comments section of popular blogs. Fund raising will be done with Google adsense. This will allow low-budget independent candidates get a foothold in the system that seems to be stifling free thought.
2. Policy-decisions: The next great political revolution may come in the form of a Wikiocracy. Why not have senators and congressmen post the bills up for debate or vote on a blog and allow constituents to comment and vote on them? Connecting with politicians may re-energize a young generation who seems to have lost contact with the political system.

Over the weekend, I was cleaning out some old posts on my Facebook account and decided to look through my friends list. Page after page I was confronted with high schoolers from church, friends of my aunts and even my boss from my summer job. My spirit was fully crushed when a wall post showed up on my stalker feed from one aunt suggesting that another help my grandparents set up an account.

For months I have been receiving constant updates about everything from people’s grocery shopping trips to the drama in my church youth group. Unfortunately, a lot of these people are great friends of mine, but the details they posted didn’t interest me and merely served to clog up my site and make it hard to find the information that interests and/or affects me.

Since I couldn’t make myself pick and choose among my friends for who I would delete or who I still wanted to be in contact with, I deleted them all. Facebook has become more of a hassle than it is worth as a networking tool.

One of the best parts of the blogosphere is that, without needing to be submitted for editing, data and opinions can be almost instantaneously shared around the globe. A limitation of traditional blogging is the readers’ need to refresh the page to get the latest content. A website called CoverItLive.com is out the change that. It provides free live-blogging software.

The website provides a form of a chat window that can be embedded into a blog and as the writer updates the site it automatically updates the live blog. The software also allows readers to submit comments and the writer can moderate a debate or a discussion among his readers.

Possibly the best use of this technology is in conjunction with sporting events. Over this past weekend, I had the opportunity to particpate as a reader in a live blog about the Super Bowl [some of the language may be PG-13] on profootballtalk.com. The main contributor to the website, Mike Florio, was in the press area in the stadium during the game. He kept a live blog about his experience, giving his readers a view that has become available only to the privileged few.

Also this weekend, I hosted a live blog and encouraged a few of my friends on campus to contribute so that I could get a feel of what it is like to live blog on the other end.

My experiences were both very positive. The hosting window is very simple with a pane showing reader-submitted comments, one showing the window that is made public and one with very clear organized menus of settings and user statistics. The only complaint I can make about the interface is that there was no way to make hitting ‘enter’ post directly, but you must click ‘submit’ to make a comment go live.

As a reader, the process is very straight-forward and clean. I got zero negative feedback from the people submitting comments to my blog. Having participated in a few fairly large live blogs, I noticed that it sometimes seems that your comments get swallowed up because the host selects comments and the more readers submitting makes it harder to sift through them all. However, that would be expected with any large group.

Some possible uses for this technology would be:

1. Blogging about televised sporting events
2. Giving play-by-play for games not all readers can watch
3. Commenting on an election as the poll results come in

Overall, the use of CoverItLive technology is very positive.