Twitter Does It Really Work?

Category internet | Permalink | 16. May 2007

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It’s a typical Monday morning. Annie Boccio — wife, mother of three and freelance Web designer — has a long list of things to do at home.

But for now, she is sitting at her home computer in Green Brook, N.J., and composing her first “tweet” of the day.

“Good morning Twitter! All over the place today, lots of little errands and chores, phone calls to make, e-mails to send, glad I made a list!” Boccio writes at 9:52 a.m.

Within seconds, the short message is sent out to the computers, cellphones and PDAs of more than 100 of Boccio’s friends, acquaintances and online followers. Over the course of the day, Boccio will send out nearly two dozen more short messages detailing her day (she spoke to her Mom on the phone, ate too many chocolate espresso beans, blew off her to-do list). At 8:58 p.m., she finally signs off with a message about watching the latest episode of “Heroes.”

Boccio may sound a little crazy. But she’s not. She’s just one of the growing number of people hooked on Twitter, the booming new social networking site.

What are you doing?

Twitter, developed by a small San Francisco company last year, was designed to mash up aspects of instant messaging, blogging and MySpace into a quirky new way to find new friends and keep in touch.

The concept is simple: Users answer the question “What are you doing?” as many times as they want. The only catch is, they must keep their answer to 140 characters or fewer — roughly one sentence.

Their messages, or tweets, are sent out to the computers and cellphones of the people who have signed up as their friends through the free service. Any user, even strangers, can sign on to receive your tweets. All tweets are also published on Twitter’s Web site (www.twitter.com).

So there is Valleywag, MaisonBisson, Pramit Singh, M Neylon and a whole lot of others out there who are not particularly taken up with twitter.

I guess there is a place for twitter in some instances like news or politics. Both, John Edwards and Barack Obama have a twitter stream. Is that the right way to describe twitter, I wonder.

If you are a twitter user you might want to read this post by Nitesh Dhanjanii where he talks about a security loophole in twitter. Nitesh is a well-known security expert. And if you are a twitter fan then maybe this might interest you? A twitter search engine called Twitterment That is in beta? Still not satisfied? Here is Twitterholics. Check out the who is who of the twitter world.

Maybe Scott got it right when he said “Stop twittering and go solve a problem.” That is what I intend to do. By the way, I love the name of the company that founded Twitter: The Obvious Group. Isn’t it twitterific?

To outsiders, the idea of getting dozens of short messages a day about what friends and strangers are eating for dinner may seem like torture. But Twitter fans say this form of “micro-blogging” is addictive and may just be the future of communication.

Politicians, including Democratic presidential candidates Barack Obama and John Edwards, have set up accounts to get their campaign messages out. And some celebrities, including Stephen Colbert and David Letterman, are twittering. Several regular users known for insightful or humorous tweets have also become Twitter celebrities, with thousands of strangers signing up to follow their posts.

Twitter fans have set up their own Web sites, including TwitterMap (www.twittermap.com), a site that pinpoints who in your area is twittering right now, and Twitterholic (www.twitterholic.com), a site that tracks which users have the most followers.

What are you doing next?

Twitter’s founders say the service has hundreds of thousands of users, though they decline to disclose exact numbers. In the past few months, the number of users has been “doubling every three weeks,” said Biz Stone, one of Twitter’s founders.

Stone and his colleagues are now trying to figure out what to do with Twitter’s sudden success. The service is still free and sells no advertising. Meanwhile, Twitter followers are speculating on which big corporation will swoop in and buy the tiny company.

Twitter rivals, including Jaiku, have also started to emerge. And there is already a backlash among Twitter users who say the service that was once hip and cool is now flooded with too many new users posting lame tweets about what they ate for breakfast. (Tech blogger and early Twitter enthusiast Robert Scoble recently said, “Twitter hate is the new black,” a quote that has been endlessly repeated in the Twitter Nation.)

Source : www.nwsource.com

www.desicritics.org

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