Whats the deal with Twitter? It seems like that all I hear about, whether it be with my peers, or on the news the term seems to be coming up more and more frequently. Twitter is a micro-blogging, social net working site that helps people stay in touch with "tweets" which are 140 character updates. These updates are sent to the friends, and or a selected group of people, sent either to mobile devices or to be check once on the computer.
Its no wonder that I've heard more and more about Twittering then ever before.
As of March 2009, Twitter has received more visibility and popularity worldwide. Twitter is often described as the 'SMS of Internet' in that the site provides the back-end functionality (via its APIs) to other desktop and web-based applications to send and receive short text messages often obscuring the actual website itself. This extensibility of the service has earned it more popularity than it would have garnered if users would have to visit the site to use the service.
Twitter - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Estimates of the number of daily users vary as the company does not release the number of active accounts. In November 2008, Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester Research estimated that Twitter had 4-5 million users.[2] A February 2009 Compete.com blog entry ranks Twitter as the third largest social network (MySpace would be second and Facebook would be the largest in the world[3]), and puts the number of users at roughly 6 million and the number of monthly visitors at 55 million.[3
Twitter - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Twitter is not only popular with friends and "followers" but also with big businesses looking at what is being "twittered" about and things that are liked and disliked.
Paradoxically, the best vision for Twitter may be to change very little - let the users define what Twitter is and how it should be used, and choose a business model that stays out of their way. That business model could very well be tracking the sentiment of large groups of people to help businesses make smart and profitable decisions.
Is Twitter the new Facebook, or Myspace, or just a fad that will come and go? It seems right now that Twitter is no where near being over though, it's popularity continues to grow. To me it sounds like an annoying site, to constantly be updated on what everyone is doing, and where everyone is going, and exactly what everyone is thinking.
