I've seen a few articles on Twitter recently so I figured I'd collect them. Walt Mossberg's assistant Katie wrote Birds of a Feather Twitter Together on the Wall Street Journal AllThingsD blog. It's a pretty standard intro for the uninitiated. Here's my version:
Twitter is a service that lets "twitters" post short "tweets" that others can view. There's a web site and various applications to both read and tweet and you can configure your cell phone to use it via SMS text messages. As a result all tweets are limited to 140 characters so it's short blurbs. Some people tweet haikus.
It's plain text without formatting so back to computer use from the 70s, some characters take on special meanings. You can put a @ in front of a twitter's id, like @hmelman and then it becomes a link to their page. Tweets that begin with one of these are called @replies and Twitter tries to make it easy to send one (there's a reply link that will insert this) and follow them (there's a link to see the post that was being replied to). Keywords are supposed to begin with # like #Obama but that's kinda unnecessary.
You can search all tweets for keywords. I follow a search of "Quicksilver" to see tweets about my favorite Mac application. Often they are questions and I reply, even to people I don't know. It's one of the good things about twitter. You can ask a question and someone might give you the answer.
But reading every tweet is crazy so you can follow certain accounts which means you subscribe to those user's tweets. Your Twitter home page shows the tweets of those you follow and probably any @replies sent to you.
That all sounds ok, but Twitter has had a lot of stability problems and was down a lot. To alleviate some of that they curtailed some features but they seem to be getting better. I find the link to the original tweet of an @reply is often broken and I'd really like to see a single page showing the whole thread like a gmail shows conversations. I said I search for Quicksilver but I often see tweets about the book or movie or other things I'm not interested in, this is why natural language (particularly english) doesn't work so well with computers. Also while I follow some friends I follow some well-known industry twitterers and I'm finding my home page is a little crowded and my friends are twittering less.
So here's "Examples of how the popular service's community puts it to use", Power-Tweeting: 101 Everyday Uses for Twitter. Most of these I find pretty lame.
Nevertheless I have gotten some value from Twitter. I see tweets about news items before I see them in the news. It takes far less time to compose 140 characters than a complete article. Also some things are better off in short form than padded out to make an article. Too often I read things where the headline told me everything I needed to know, twitter is just headlines.
Some feeds have been great, the Mars rover had an account sent out updates when it had news. They anthropomorphized it and it was fun. Also with some friends who I see infrequently, I find I keep up with them a little more often when they tweet about something they're doing. When I do see them I can ask about stuff. I once tweeted "being irradiated" and that started a few conversations. :)
So yes, Twitter just seems to be the next Web 2.0 social site of the moment. In fact they were in talks to work or merge with Facebook (the previous Web 2.0 social site of the moment) but Twitter turned them down. The real reason seems to be Facebook's super-inflated $15 billion evaluation. I suspect their current $5 billion valuation is still crazy high.
Twitter's own valuation is about $100 million which seems crazy given that "Twitter has raised $20 million from venture capitalists, but has brought in virtually no revenue, choosing growth over everything else." But then the recession is changing that strategy. “Revenue is now a priority for the first quarter of next year" since they don't want to have to raise money in 2009. I'm curious as to what will change.
Update: Here's some research on Twitter from HP Labs.
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