Is Twitter actually beneficial in an educational context?

Because of the technical limitations of Twitter, especially the 140 character limitation, it's reasonable to question how beneficial microblogging applications such as Twitter are.

The way Twitter is designed only provides you 140 characters to share information with an individual's followers. However, Twitter facilitates the use of URL shorteners. The most popular website to do that is Tiny URL . This site allows users to share websites, blogs, articles, or anything else they can think of that resides on another website, but with a much shorter URL.

However, this means that Twitter is only the vehicle to let others know about information. It's not actually providing the information that the user is trying to get to their followers. Despite that, it's still a useful piece of technology if others have the right hardware to access it. The main problem with using Twitter to convey web links is if a person receives Twitter updates via SMS text, they will not be able to access that link unless their mobile device is also internet compatible.

Not only that, but since Twitter relies on an outside source to provide shortened URLs, they run the risk of that website going down and losing functionality of all the updates that include those links. Center Networks has a short article that provides a decent solution that Twitter should consider to create a more self-sustaining site that becomes a more useful application for a larger variety of individuals.