Do not copy anything without
permission ya !
The one
thing you can say for certain about Twitter is that it makes a terrible
first impression. You hear about this new service that lets you send
140-character updates to your "followers," and you think, Why does the world
need this, exactly? It's not as if we were all sitting around four years ago
scratching our heads and saying, "If only there were a technology that would
allow me to send a message to my 50 friends, alerting them in real time
about my choice of breakfast cereal."
I, too, was skeptical at first. I had met Evan Williams, Twitter's
co-creator, a couple of times in the dotcom '90s when he was launching
Blogger.com. Back then, what people worried about was the threat that
blogging posed to our attention span, with telegraphic, two-paragraph blog
posts replacing long-format articles and books. With Twitter, Williams was
launching a communications platform that limited you to a couple of
sentences at most. What was next? Software that let you send a single
punctuation mark to describe your mood? (See the top 10 ways Twitter will
change American business.)
And yet as millions of devotees have discovered, Twitter turns out to have
unsuspected depth. In part this is because hearing about what your friends
had for breakfast is actually more interesting than it sounds. The
technology writer Clive Thompson calls this "ambient awareness": by
following these quick, abbreviated status reports from members of your
extended social network, you get a strangely satisfying glimpse of their
daily routines. We don't think it at all moronic to start a phone call with
a friend by asking how her day is going. Twitter gives you the same
information without your even having to ask.
The social warmth of all those stray details shouldn't be taken lightly. But
I think there is something even more profound in what has happened to
Twitter over the past two years, something that says more about the culture
that has embraced and expanded Twitter at such extraordinary speed. Yes, the
breakfast-status updates turned out to be more interesting than we thought.
But the key development with Twitter is how we've jury-rigged the system to
do things that its creators never dreamed of.