The British Government And Twitter

Low and behold, the British Government has released a 20 page document that instructs its civil servants how and what to tweet. This is groundbreaking. That the government of Gordon Brown - the analog politician in a digital age - would not only allow his government to tweet, but to encourage it is huge. This has completely changed my view on the long term viability of twitter. To me, Gordon Brown has just announced that Twitter is here to stay.

When Twitter was first explained to me by a friend this summer, I was unimpressed. My initial thought was, "how is that any different from Facebook status?" Wasn't there already was an outlet for that sort of thing? Evidently I didn't understand the nuances of microblogging.

Touching on a point from my previous posting, I was originally fearful that Twitter would faze out without reaching it's true potential. I thought that microblogging might fall out of favor and people would move onto a new fad. Apparently I was wrong. With the addition of the full force of the British government behind Twitter I feel that it can finally grow and blossom into a fully functioning member of our social and business lives.

On a slightly different note. It has occurred to me that Twitter is the only application I can think of that functions both for our children as a social device and for our business people and government officials and formal tool of communication. Fascinating!