Twittering healthcare: social media and medicine.

Introduction t’s mildly surprising to look for a definition of “social media” and not find it to be: an Internet-based way to stay in touch with friends, waste time, and kill productivity. It is, instead, loosely defined as user-generated content utilizing Internetbased publishing technologies, distinct from traditional print and broadcast media. If there is a key differentiator for social media, it is the phrase “user-generated,” distinguishing it from the content created by professional journalists, broadcasters, or other paid content providers. If the concept of social media started with chat rooms and moved on to listservs, blogs, and RSS feeds, then social network sites such as MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn, the biggest current attentiongrabber in the evolution of social media is Twitter. What is Twitter, and does it have applications to healthcare and telemedicine?