Twitter: The next big thing (until the next one)

Ever since members of the U.S. Congress were caught twittering (tweeting?) during a speech by President Obama, the media has been in love with Twitter. It's sad, I know.

There's some speculation that this is because traditional news media are currently being decimated by the Internet. And if you can't beat them, you join them. Right?

This isn't groundbreaking. Broadcast news has been dipping into the citizen journalism and online submission shtick for a good while now. iReport and News To Me on CNN, U-Report on Fox, to name a couple. Twitter is just the latest piece of the Internet pie that traditional media have finally deemed legitimate.

Sam Diaz of ZDNet takes a closer look at this tv-twitter affair (as well as the startling data gathered by comScore) in his article "Twitter and news media: A long-term relationship or just a fling?":

If Twitter continues its upswing growth over the next few years, there’s an opportunity for news media outlets to jump on the coat-tails and, theoretically, build a following of readers who will return regularly - with or without a Twitter link. Basically, the news media will use Twitter as a distribution tool.

Personally, I think Twitter is an interesting application (service?), fun at times but ultimately pointless. Bloggers, myself included, try to use it as a promotional tool to varying degrees of success. Others just for a quick beat on what their friends are up to.

However, I'm not entirely convinced it is a good platform for news. Perhaps for links to news, but we're already fed short enough sound-bites as it is.

How much shorter can our attention spans become?