Creativity

I think New Media has definitely come to embrace the creativity of its users as well as fostering it. Twitter not only designs and engineers new uses for it's site, they have also learned to monitor and use the feedback from is users. Many of Twitter's features such as hashtags, retweets, and the "@" symbol, were not thought up by professional programmers. Instead, these were introduced by Twitter users, which Twitter than adapted and modified. They monitored their site to see what was going on. When something interesting began to take shape, they took note of it and then decided on whether they would implement it as a feature. To improve these user's idea's they would take the original, and see what they could add to it in order to be more user friendly (ex: hyperlinks with hashtags and @ symbols) or more secure (ex: direct retweets so that the original content may not be modified). Twitter is not the first or only company to take advantage of its users. However, in doing so, users get a chance to come up with new ideas. Not only does this allow us to be creative, but it encourages us to think outside the box, as it seems that we have a say in what we want from the technology we are using. Twitter Serves Up Ideas From Its Followers