"Twitter users post short messages, either from a personal computer or mobile phone. These are usually made public, though they can be restricted to selected people. Anyone who wants to track a Twitterer’s public “tweets” can choose to become a “follower”: the “stream” of messages is then mixed in with streams from all the other people that are being followed, whether just a small number of friends or a large group made up of celebrities, politicians and others who have rushed to get a voice in this new domain."
I do not use Twitter, other than occasionally coming across other people's use of it when searching the Web. Just as blogging used to leave me cold, so does Twitter.......
This longish piece by Richard Waters, Chris Nuttall and David Gelles, in the Financial Times, follows the US start-up's recent success in raising £24m in venture capital. The article gives a coherent description of the service and the underlying reasons for its success, and provides non-users with an overview of the Twitter "lingo". [I've included a chart from the article despite its the lack of any scale for the y axis.) The piece also manages to include a sidebar picking up on Baroness Professor Susan Greenfield's views - which are everywhere - about being active online causing brain damage.
Twitter is the most important component of my personal learning network. The realtime web is here. http://twitter.com/AJCann. :-)
Posted by: AJ Cann | 27/02/2009 at 12:16
Greenfield, a professional scientist, has managed to write a book that has hyperbolic hypotheses backed up by absolutely no scientific evidence. It's a disgrace. See my review.
Posted by: Donald Clark | 28/02/2009 at 19:41
Micro-blogging generally has more benefits than not. My views: http://dsugden.posterous.com/micro-blogging-0.
David
Posted by: David Sugden | 01/03/2009 at 11:49