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Do you Twitter? If you're not sure, you've not yet fallen prey to the internet's latest fad. Anybody who is anybody in the worldwide weborati is Twittering.
Twitter.com launched almost exactly a year ago, and asked the simplest of questions: "What are you doing?" Members (sign-up was and is free) update their online profiles via a Twitter homepage, or by instant messenger or text message, friends subscribe to each other's message feeds, and soon everybody knows what everybody else is doing.
For Twitterers, you'd think that would be pretty much nothing except monitoring each other's Twitter feeds. Sounds stupid? That's what I thought. An inherently noble social web plumbing depths of inanity: Big Brother Live in text form.
But 50,000 active users disagree with me some 30,000 times a day - and they include US presidential
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50,000 people a day are Twittering at one another. Why the fuss, asks linton chiswick |
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candidate John Edwards, the New York Times and the BBC.
The nature of Twitter is changing. Go to the 'public timeline' or Twittervision and you'll find plenty of people telling a surely indifferent world they're on a bus, eating a Big Mac or listening to Stevie Nicks.
Some Twitterers, though, are doing more: posting links and thoughts (effectively, blogging in 140 characters or less); engaging in active conversations; networking or finding who they know in the neighbourhood so they can meet in the physical world. Some are posting requests for technical help.
So - to Twitter or not? I know two Twitterers and their advice was identical. It's a good way to feel connected to long-distance friends, but don't subscribe to too many feeds, and don't sign up to the SMS service. A hundred text messages a day? That way madness lies. 
FIRST POSTED MARCH 20, 2007
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