Max

Do any other elowelers use twitter?

I do, now. When twitter was first released I observed the phenomena from afar and never signed up or really browsed the site. For whatever reason I kept myself semi-purposefully ignorant of the site for the first three years of it's existence.

I was even somewhat hostile to the whole idea. People hammering out the minutiae of there lives 140 characters at a time -- what a bore! And cute verbs for the whole affair... the whole lot of twitterers "tweat"-ing or "chirp"-ing or worse.

But a week ago my boss and a dude from a neighbouring department were talking about how they got turned on to twitter, my boss had set up a second account as his kitten and was microblogging the kittens activities alongside his own. My co-worker who had let my boss have a sip of the twitteraid had gone to some twitter-centric social events.

It sounded like a good party, so I signed up (as Maximus_Freeman).

Twitter is really fascinating in that it provides an avenue for mass-chatting along two key communication channels: the web and SMS. Through twitter event and topic based groupings can arise such as the ongoing portland winter storm watch which provides up to the minute weather intelligence as sighted by human (and sometimes robot) observers in the general Portland area. At times the stream of postings provide a more global gestalt of a topic, such as the twitter recommended #haiku.

Key to twitter's awesome is the content targeting and indexing that's done of each post. For example, based on some vector of location, phrase frequency over time twitter will list trends, so that when I woke up this morning #pdxtst was a trend listed on the front page of the ever so comprehensive search.twitter.com.

Predominantly though the posts you're exposed to on twitter are the posts of your friends and conversations (private or public) that naturally arise therein. There's also an option to subscribe to "device updates" from an accounts friends, this means that a text message will be sent to the phone associated to the account whenever that user updates. It's also possible to have all replies to an account forwarded to a phone AND most importantly: it is possible to post over text message, friend people over text message, subscribe to someone over text message, etc. etc.

SMS access and a strong API for other services to make contact with twitter makes twitter super accessible (and truly present outside of the web), it allows users to subscribe to thoughts about topics or thoughts from their friends then receive the information however they choose in a constant stream. The mandatory short and succinct style of the messages makes this constant stream manageable and usable.

It's a new age in the evolution of human consciousness!