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Twitter has become an almost literal overnight sensation. People either have it, don’t want it, or don’t know anything about it beside the name, which seems to have been dropped everywhere lately.
The micro-blogging site was actually released three years ago, but recently exploded in popularity when different celebrities and personalities adopted it as a means of communicating more closely with friends and fans.
The Twitter home page explains that “twitter is a service for friends, family, and co-workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: what are you doing?” These ‘answers’ are called tweets, and are limited to 140 characters. The format seems restrictive, but I’ve found it breeds inspiration, like being forced to conform to a rhyme scheme when writing a poem.
I signed up for a twitter account about a week ago for the purposes of this article to see if it was really a service I didn’t know I needed but can’t live without. I started following some friends and celebrities and was awe-struck with the kind of ambient awareness the site delivers. The format delivers frequent updates, though in my week with Twitter there were never any of that much significance. A friend of mine sent updates about his favorite shirt shrinking, another complained about how slowly time was moving at work, and WBEZ pestered me with reminders about their live-cast of ‘This American Life.’
When I joined Twitter, I was assaulted with the volume of options there are for updating your status. Twitter provides options for linking a mobile phone to your account and updating through text message, there are applications to link Twitter updates with other social networking sites, a wealth of applications for the iPhone as well as for blackberry platforms, and even software devoted solely to the management of one’s status and watching the accounts you’re following.
In actuality, I’ve been following the Twitter formula through Facebook status updates for some time. It didn’t seem like a novelty or a necessity, but it is a condensed and convenient way of receiving updates from my favorite LOST blog and Stephen Colbert.
This video, courtesy of Super News, sums the whole thing up pretty well.
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