Em & Em

Twitter. Tweet. Tweeted. These are all words that over a year ago would most likely have brought either birds or gibberish to mind.  When people in the media try to discuss the Twitter phenomenon, they still regularly mess up the terms and misunderstand the practice.

We are proud Twitter users. We are also both students in the journalism department, which has recently incorporated Twitter into the curriculum as part of a special topics class on social media in public relations. Microblogging has academic relevance now.

An art exhibit in Sprowls last semester even utilized Twitter. The exhibit on digital literature featured a laptop with an endless poem, composed entirely of Tweets.

Twitter. It's art, poetry, news and entertainment. It is the one thing you might not know you're missing on the Internet.

Stop dragging your feet and send a tweet. Messages of 140 characters or less helped tell the world what was really going on during the Iranian elections over the summer. Social media broadcasted a hushed political uprising, giving the service a new level of legitimacy.

Twitter, unlike Facebook and MySpace, seeks to extend this legitimacy with the verified account program. If you see a celebrity account with a blue checkmark icon, Twitter has verified that the account owner is actually that celebrity, be it faux newsman Stephen Colbert or real newsman Anderson Cooper.