Twitter The Official Backchannel

DAMIEN MULLEY gave over a half page in the business section of the Sunday Tribune to Ireland's newest official back channel. That would be Twitter, the most viral communications widget of 2007. It is basically the "status" feature of Facebook with textable and subscribeable capabilities that work with straight SMS or instant messaging of all flavours. It treats those with continuous partial attention malady. It has an A-List. It has enabled microblogging for the masses because its simplicity facilitates easy answers, quick synopses, friend-sourcing, and treatment for those with short attention spans. It has also wormed its way into the Irish back channel. Appropriately denigrated for its banality, Twitter also delivers some clever 140-character pointers to breaking events, important cross-tell, and eureka moments. Twitter isn't for everyone and some people despise anything that pre-empts their in-box with superficial mutterings. But if you fancy easy text blogging, Twitter is right up your street. In fact, it is part of your street since you live in the Information Age.

Ross Mayfield suggests reasons why Twitter might fit inside a company. After several employees joined Twitter, Mayfield set up http://twitter.com/socialtext "for no reason in particular.  I posted the login in a private wiki page to let anyone contribute.  But when Moconner saw how simple the API was, he wrote a bot to let us post from our IRC channel.  Now we have a low threshold way to express group identity that fits with the way we work." Cool.

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Bloggers Blog -- Best info about Twitter.
Chris Brogan -- "5 Ways to Use Twitter for Good"
Karoli -- "Twitter This!"
Marshall Kirkpatrick -- "Twitter Top Ten"
Damien Mulley -- "New Twits on the Block" (including me).
Matthew Ingram -- "Twitter is Noise. But also signal."
Suw Charman shares good noise via Twitter. Hers came to my mobile phone!
Ross Mayfield -- "Twitter Tips the Tuna"
Steve Rubel -- "Twitter, Human Attention and Moore's Law"
James Corbett -- Timeline of Irish Tweets"
Tom Raftery -- "How Can We Capitalise on Twitter's Addictiveness?"
Dave Winer -- "The Future of Twitter"
More from Dave Winer -- "How basic is Twitter?"
Twitterholic -- "Who are these people?"
Michele Neylon -- "Twitter is Dumb."
Bonus Link: Bernie Goldbach's Favourite Tweets

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Comments

[Stephanie O'Shea]

I have just started using twitter two days ago and am finding it excellent. It is a space where Instant Messaging, SMS and blogging combine to create an easy to use social networking application

[James Byrne]

Twitter is a refreshing alternative to those blogs that drone on and on. It could be very useful for the user looking for to-the-point information through the use of microblogging and phone messaging. I like the idea of using it on different media (phone, IM, web)..

[Siobhan Joyce]

Twitter is great because there are so many ways to add info to twitter you can send a text message, use IM or use web. So you don't even need access to internet to use it, you could send twitter messages whilst on a train. Because the posts are nice and short you can quickly peruse the page for interesting posts and keep up with some of the top blogging personalities and your friends. Twitter is quick and snappy and more people will be willing to read the snappy comments than a full blog.

[Aoife Mac]

I find Twitter interesting because I can see it being used for advertisment blogs for music gigs in my local area. Were you get people to join a Twitter group who want t know what gigs are coming up in the next week.

[Thelma Cotter]

Twitter is an interesting idea... personally I havent used it yet, but to text friends abroad now for the summer is going to lessen the cost of holiday roaming charges etc to family and friends. All it needs now is word of mouth from friend to friend and once we have all of our contacts on there... it really will be a new step up in communications, interculturally and interpersonally.

[Antoine Mas]

Twitter is not interesting way of communication, it's just a new (and not useful) tool, to tell his life. And NOBODY cares about it.
Here are some examples:
"SA_Cherub doing absolutely NOTHING".
"ev stressful day".
"halfandheart getting food. im starving".

Thanks God, starvation, war, poverty will disappear thanks to this comments.

Go in town, have a few pints and speak with real people, this is the best "social networking" ever.

[Karen Walsh]

Twitter has a fun range of possibilities, and while it is not as customisable as I would like, the constraints prevent people from making horrific sites (from a design point of view) that are allowed by other sites, such as MySpace. Twitter is a community web space, that uses texting to a great advantage, while allowing people who are not html-fluent to create an attractive site. Its quite basic in functionality at the moment, however with an increase in bandwidth, functionality could be added and membership could increase- creating a happy cycle of growth and change.

[Lilly D]

With the popularity of texting and blogging hitting a high it was inevitable that something like Twitter would be developed and it seems to be on the mark with its simplicity to connect people through a common device.

[Bruce Restrepo]

I believe Twitter's strongest feature is allowing people to text in/receive there blogs-messages (microblogs) from anywhere. No more need for a PC or even Internet connection directly, now are the days where the Internet’s reach expands to more. It’s implementations like this that will have everyone on the planet connected, bringing us closer together. Maybe one day a tipping point will be reached and we’ll find that it’s actually keeping us apart.