Net atwitter with Twitter
2007-06-09 11:38
San Francisco - Tweet, tweet, tweet.
Internet and mobile phone message boards are atwitter with Twitter, the raging online trend to share one's every move with friends Haiku-style every moment of the day.
Twitter users get a maximum of 140 characters a shot to answer the question "What are you doing?"
A relentless flood of "tweets" as seemingly mundane as "I'm boiling water" or "Walking the dog" relentlessly flood members' e-mails, instant message boards and a public timeline on the twitter.com website.
"The first reaction is to hate it because it's seen as the most useless thing in the world and no one would ever want to know about boiling water", Twitter founder and chief executive Jack Dorsey told AFP.
"But these small details in life are what connect us most. Everyone has these specific moments and you normally don't bring them up in conversation because it seems so trivial but it's not, it's really important."
Twitter is run by Dorsey's ten-person San Francisco start-up Obvious.
Instant
Twitter's website uses instant messaging software to continually update a public timeline with terse sentences from "twitters" telling what they are doing that instant.
Twitters get seconds of fame at the top of the timeline before being bumped down by the next message in a perpetually repeating cycle.
Twitters can track their friends in the network but strangers or "followers" can also get people's tweets.
Some people simply sit and watch the timeline roll by, said Twitter designer Biz Stone.
Stone, 31, says the vision of Twitter as the future of communication came clear to him weeks ago when a tweet from friends told him of a California earthquake as he was about to get on an underground train in the state.
"It was an immediate pulse that sums up the zeitgeist of Twitter," Stone said.
Inspiration for Twitter comes from Dorsey's experience writing software for courier and emergency services dispatchers that need to quickly route people between locations.