How clever can one be in just 140 characters? This is the challenge posed by the newly popularized micro-blog site twitter.com. The micro-blog Twitter is a fast and effective way to keep fellow bloggers up to date on basic yet semi-personal information.
“It’s simply an easy way to send updates to my friends. It’s cheaper than sending out a bunch of text messages, since you just have to send one to Twitter and then Twitter sends it to everyone who is subscribed to me. Also, if I leave my cell at home and I have my laptop with me, I can use it to send texts to people from twitter.com,” explained Fresno City College student, Julie Morrice.
The website professes, “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?”
Twitter works much like mass email, text messages, Facebook updates and Myspace posts. It pushes blogging to new limits by asking its users to sum up their information in 140 characters or less. This usually limits bloggers to use concise prose and simple words. For example:
“There is a big party at Matt’s house this weekend” or “I’m going to the Flashback Flick of Spaceballs tomorrow at Edwards at 10 p.m.”
These cheekily named “tweets” can be delivered to any or all fellow Tweeters. Twitter updates can be received via email, RSS feeds, Twitterific (a Mac OS X, iPhone and iPod application) or via a Facebook application.
Although Twitter is nearly two years old, it has only recently gained its mass popularity due to large companies and departments such as NASA and the BBC using Twitter Tweets to give news junkies a quick fix prompt and concisely.
Recently, celebrities have been jumping aboard the Twitter bandwagon. British comedians Stephen Fry, Academy Award winning screenwriter Diablo Cody and horror filmmaker James Gunn, as well as politicians Barrack Obama and Joe Biden are all Twitter Tweeters. Although many celebrity Tweeters have been ousted as fakery, some are quite accurate with information regarding a celebrity’s whereabouts.
The downside is that once one has amassed a large number of friends on Twitter, the updates can become quite irritating. The constant pings and tweets of updates can become overwhelming to the point of frustration.
For those using Twitter on their phone, the constant text messages can accrue many tiny charges that eventually lead to an expensive cell phone bill.
Lately Twitter has recently come into some controversy when the American government concluded that the miniature blogging network could be effectively used by terrorist organizations to strategize and implement terrorist activities and attacks. Islamic extremist and Al-Qaeda related forums have been discussing ways to use various GPS, cell phones and online communications such as Twitter to smuggle plans and weapons across borders.
The Federation of the American Scientists reported that “the activists would Tweet each other and their Twitter pages to add information on what was happening with law enforcement near
