Twitter and the Micro-Messaging Revolution: Communication, Connections, and Immediacy—140 Characters at a Time

1 : Twitter and the Micro-Messaging Revolution

Like a lot of people, I didn’t think much of Twitter at first.

I signed up to check it out, but didn’t find much there for

me. I wasn’t interested in hearing about where people

were having coffee, what they had for dinner, or who

they were hanging out with. It seemed like a great appli-

cation for people with too much time on their hands.

But some months later I was back. Because Twitter lets

anyone “follow” any other user, rather than requesting a

formal declaration of “friendship,” and because I’m a well-

known person, one day I realized that I had about 5000

people following me on Twitter, waiting to hear from me.

Huh? I’d better give them something to follow, I thought.

So I started posting. But because I’m a serious guy,

I tended to post links to what I was reading or writing,

not what I was eating or drinking. And I noticed that lots

of other people were doing that too. Before long, I found

myself using Twitter as my principal source of news,

forgoing my RSS reader for the more varied and stimulat-

ing flow that comes from people sharing the very best

things that they’ve read lately.

And because I was using Twhirl, a Twitter client that

has an easy button for “retweeting”—that is, passing on

the best tweets from someone you’re following, I soon

found that I had a great opportunity to bring attention

to insights from people who had fewer ...