Twitter-licious?

February 29, 2008 · Filed Under Technology

What Is Twitter?

Twitter is the newest craze to hit the blogging and social networking world. It is a social networking site that allows users to send messages 140 characters long to friends who are on their Twitter friends list. Twitter resembles messaging applications like Yahoo! messenger because it allows users to communicate using short texts, called ‘tweets’.

Users can create a profile on the twitter website, invite friends to their friends list, and start sending their messages to the website via SMS and sending it to 40404. These messages will then be relayed to the people on their friends list. It is entirely up to you if you want to send a message to a hundred other people, or to ten.

If you are on somebody else’s friends list here’s the low-down on what you’ll be seeing (and often!). Every time your friend decides to send an update, these updates are instantly displayed on his site, and is sent to you, if your phone, email, browser, or IM service if you are one of the people who have signed up to receive his updates.

If you want to stop receiving updates on your phone, you can do this by keying in OFF and sending the message to 40404. You can turn Twitter ‘off’ if you are in habit of doing some messaging at specific hours of the day. Some people like to send messages at night, as a way to relax and unwind.

Twitter is the brainchild of Jack Dorsey. It was originally a research and development project of his start-up company Obvious LL in 2006. The service rose to popularity when it received the South by SouthWest Web Award in the blog category. By 2007, Twitter Inc., a separate entity from Obvious LLC, was born, with Jack Dorsey as its CEO.

What made Twitter so popular in so short a time is that it is a very simple and easy way to broadcast anything to your friends (and stalkers). It has often been referred to as micro blogging since you can only so much with 140 characters. Despite this, more and more users are seeing Twitter’s potential not only as a way to inform others about what you are up to, but also as a great marketing tool.

Twitter has been greeted by many with mixed reactions. Those who have been using social networking and messaging services see Twitter as one of the many start-up services that work exactly like the others before it. As of May 2007 there were 111 other sites that looked and worked like Twitter online.

Others say that Twitter is but another addition to the ties that are pulling us all closer together, which may be a good thing for some. Some people, however, think that services like this are already too much of a good thing, and that they can easily make us feel ‘too connected’ for our own good.

But despite this Twitter has a host of fans. Many blogs and social sites now have twitter plugins.

One could say it’s twitter-ific!

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