Let's Twitter

If You Can’t Let Go, Twitter
Sometimes, you just have to trust your relatives. You have to be willing to let them leave the house unchallenged. Suspend disbelief and let them take the car.

That’s what I tell my three daughters, anyway. But it never works out like that.

They just can’t let me go.

“where r u?” one daughter texted to my phone the other day.

“whats 4 dinner?” a second one buzzed seconds later.

“cant find black cardigan ... did u take it w/o asking?” messaged the third.

Some day these people will get their own lives, and I’ll be able to pop out to buy ballet flats whenever I want. But until they do, I figured there had to be a more efficient way for me to keep in touch with all of them at once.

This was how I ended up signing up for a free account from Twitter, a group-messaging application that despite all the media attention it has received still hasn’t broken into the mainstream or become a to-die-for tool.

While some tech-savvy adherents use Twitter to “micro-blog” from cellphones and BlackBerrys, as well as from computers, other digital natives like my teenage daughters and their friends have remained oblivious to its charms.

But I thought Twitter would be perfect for my purposes. The service allows users to text a message of up to 140 characters to an unlimited number of people simultaneously, from anywhere. Anytime.

Twitter’s popularity is growing steadily (nearly 1.2 million users visited Twitter.com in December 07, a 223 percent increase over the same month in the previous year, according to comScore Inc.,). But it still has a much smaller following than top social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook.

In fact, among a group of about 6,000 social networking sites whose traffic is measured by Hitwise, an analysis company, Twitter .com was the 765th.

“The site gets a lot of buzz and attention, but its popularity is still pretty nascent as far as being mainstream,” said Matt Tatham, a Hitwise spokesman.

Biz Stone, a founder, declined to say how many users the service has, but did say that third-party developers had created a number of tangential applications that drive “20 times more traffic than our Web site.”

(Example: Twittervision, a map that shows what twitterers say in real time.)

Via NYT

History of Twitter
Twitter, Inc. was born out of the offices of Obvious in March of 2006, a 10-person start-up in San Francisco called Obvious lead by Evan Williams, the well-known Silicon Valley entrepreneur who in the 1990s co-founded Blogger.

What is Twitter?
A Web site and service that lets users send short text messages from their cellphones to a group of friends. Launched in 2006, Twitter (www.twitter.com) was designed for people to broadcast their current activities and thoughts.

Twitter expanded "mobile blogging" into "microblogging," the updating of an activities blog (microblog) that distributes the text to a list of names.

Messages can also be sent and received via instant messaging, the Twitter Web site or a third-party Twitter application.

Source: Computer Desktop Encyclopedia