Can you explain in simple terms the differences between 'twitter', 'blogging', 'text messaging', 'chat rooms', 'threads' and why not just e-mail everything?

asgardshill

The most important difference between all these ways of communicating is CONTROL. In other words, figuring out who gets to read what you've written, who gets to reply to what you've written, who decides who gets to read what you've written, and who decides who gets to reply to what you've written. Twitter is a way to send and receive short, 140-character messages to and from other Twitter users. It is an easy way to read short messages using the small display on your cell phone, but you can do this on your computer as well. If you read another person's messages, you are one of that person's followers. If you write messages and somebody else reads them, that person is one of your followers. You can choose whether you want to have any followers at all and who can be your follower, and others can do the same thing for your messages. Blogging is a way to send and receive longer messages, pictures, or anything you might see on a web page to and from your own little corner of the Internet. Usually, anybody can read your blog but you can control whether they can reply to your messages and add their own material there. Likewise, you can read other people's blogs but they have the ability to choose whether you can reply to their messages and add your own material there. Text messaging works almost like Twitter does, except that it is designed primarily to let one person send short messages to another person's cell phone and allow that person to reply in kind. Some text messaging applications share more of Twitter's features and abilities, but that's the basic way it works. A chat room works much like a blog, but is designed to allow large numbers of people to communicate with each other in one place. Chat rooms actually came along a long time before blogging was popular. Again, control is the thing here: you can choose whether others can post in your chat room at all, you can choose the type of content they can post, and you can even ban one or more of them from posting at all. A thread is simply one post in a chat room or blog with its follow-on replies. Some people actually DO email everything: its called a "mailing list", and it was a very popular way of mass communication up until just a few years ago. But other ways of communication such as blogs and chat rooms allow for faster replies between groups of people than mailing lists do. And due to the spam problem associated with email, replies to your emails can get lost in the shuffle and get mixed up with other correspondence you receive there. Sep 09 09, 5:42 PM