The Pebble and the Avalanche

Wed, 2008-Apr-30, 09:04

If you haven't used it, Twitter is one of those "I don't think I get it" technologies. Leaving aside the cute terminology, Twitter provides microblogging. Ordinary blogs are short essays, such as this one; when I write a blog post it usually takes considerable time and effort. Twitter accepts only very short blog entries, 140 characters or less. These updates are sent to anyone who subscribes to them and can also be tossed into a large public pool for anyone to read. While this might sound sort of useless and derivative, it's anything but; I ask you to recall that blogging is really just a quick-and-dirty way to update web pages, and look what it has become now. Twitter lowers the barrier even further.

Is Twitter popular? Yes, extremely so; new media technologist Dan York has a Twitter account followed by over one thousand people. His "tweets" cover everything from his his latest technology thoughts to the local weather. (My account is the much same way.)

I've recently discovered that Twitter can provide an amazing technical resource: instant expert help from people who you didn't know even existed. Some individuals monitor the entire Twitter stream for certain keywords — and they might respond to your comments with extremely welcome help. Earlier today I noted in passing that I couldn't find a particular software function in the Ruby programming language; a few moments later Ivor Paul responded with a few well-chosen links to Ruby documentation that will cut hours off of my learning curve. And earlier this week Neil Edwards, twittering from London, gave me a leg up on finding the right software to make Ruby on Rails more useful.

I'm fascinated by the capabilities of Twitter. Twitter is disaggregated: Twitter allows access to Twitter as a a building block for other services. Now I've begun to wonder just where all this will lead.

Topics: · internet · technology

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Comments: 1, Trackbacks: 0

Anjuan wrote at 2008-05-02 10:15:

I think that it is Twitter's usefulness as an information tool that will bring it to mainstream success. It may even become more of a background service much in the way that RSS is widely used (but largely unknown to the general public) today.

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