Quick Tweets vs. Extensive Articles

Twitter is truly a revolutionary innovation.  Created only in March of 2006, it has changed the face of news dramatically in such a short time span.  It forces news producers to fit the significance of a story into only 140 characters.  In just six years, Twitter has grown to produce 300 million tweets a day!  As incredible as these numbers are, they are also scary.  We expect Twitter to act as our source of news/current events, when the reality is that Twitter can only give us so much information.  In only 140 characters, the reader cannot possibly understand what the story is about.  This could lead to some misconceptions about what the story is really about.  I am guilty of it myself.  A few times a day I scroll through my Twitter home page reading the titles of the articles, but I rarely click on the article to read it.  By reading the title, I feel like I know what is going on because I have "heard of it."  But the reality is, I have no idea what the story is about or any of the details.  Twitter does a really good job at getting readers to follow news producer's Twitters, but how often do you click on every article that interests you.  The whole point of Twitter is fast, short information.  Thus, taking the time read the article defeats that purpose.  It will be interesting to see what Twitter will become because of how much it has influenced over just the last six years.

Twitter says it themselves: "Quick, frequent answers to one simple question..."