The Hindu Business Line : The Web's all 'a-twitter'

Social Networking meets the mobile network: that was how one user explained the raging new Internet phenomenon known as Twitter. Others simply see this as the next logical evolution of blogging which has moved from simple text (typified by services such as Blogger) to photos (Flickr) to videos (YouTube).

Twitter is a side project started last year by the San Francisco (California, US-based) Obvious Corporation. As the Web site (www.twitter.com ) explains, it is a global community of friends and strangers answering one simple question: "What are you doing?" You can answer through the phone, instant messaging — or with a Web posting. The limit per posting is 140 characters — but there is no limit on how often one can twitter. However, it is only in the last week or so that Twitter has suddenly captured the imagination of netizens and become something of a craze. The huge spike in usage came at the South by South West Conference at Austin, Texas, an annual get-together for New Media Web developers. The event organisers created a rolling screen for delegates to post their twitters. Today a Google search on `twitter' throws up over 11 million results — but less than 200 are news sites, which shows the media has been slow to wake up to this exploding trend. Users, who have to sign up at Twitter for a free account, have kept up a never ending stream of messages, some of them seemingly of interest to no one except themselves — yet dozens of friends sign up to be interrupted with these twitters. Cynics have condemned this as yet another example of bandwidth wastage but the trend was sufficiently strong for mainstream media such as The Wall Street Journal to take note with serious evaluation of the long-term benefits of such social networking. Elsewhere it is being called a `real time status update service for the rest of us'.

Meanwhile one blogger, Peter Cashmore, has tried to explain `twittermania' for the bemused aspirant, with a running example of how blogging has evolved to this new level:

1999: Blog: I have to tell someone of the thing that my cat did today....

2004: Flickr: Cat pictures!

2005: You Tube: Moving cat pictures

2007: Twitter: 1. p.m: My cat just sneezed. 1.02 p.m. My cat sneezed again. 1.04 p.m: Cat hasn't sneezed recently. Getting worried.