by Andrew Fielden

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Twitter is the current big thing and there are some really good things about it and there are some really bad things about it.

What is great is that it allows anyone to share ideas and information with the world very simply. There is no long and complicated setup and when you have created your account you are ready to find a few friends and off you go. It does take a while to get used to what is happening but not long. The 140 character limitation is actually a benefit as it forces brevity and allows the follower to skip through things pretty fast.

What is not so great is that it is a closed system. Twitter own it and all its content. This is bad for various reasons. First of all we have given ourselves away to Twitter. Secondly we are at the mercy of what they want to do with the system in the future and finally should the system fail temporarily or even permanently then we will be without it.

This is known and there are a lot of pundits such as Dave Winner out there saying that this is not a good state of affairs.

So what can be done. Yahoo have launched a Twitter type system that they are trialing in Brazil but I fail to see how this helps. It too is a closed system and quite frankly does nothing to help. Any system that is closed will create islands with difficult communications. There are already companies that will search across the various Social Networking sites and presumably they will just add these as they come along but that is hardly perfect and not necessarily cheap either.