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

3 : Twitter and the Micro-Messaging Revolution

Introduction:

What is Twitter?

T

witter

2

is a device-agnostic real-time

message-routing platform—which is a fancy

way of saying that it can send messages to

and receive them from a variety of devices

simultaneously, at the moment a message is sent.

That’s a powerful communications base.

When you combine it with a short messaging form

that not only lets people quickly create and consume

updates, but also lets them choose the people they’ll

receive messages from, Twitter turns out to meet a lot

of personal and professional needs. (If you haven’t used

Twitter yet or aren’t familiar with the follower model,

the box on page 12 shows you how it works.)

At first, people used Twitter to answer the ques-

tion it posed: “What are you doing?” People let others

know that they were drinking coffee and catching up

on email, making a bacon-and-peanut-butter sandwich,

or watching the dog sleep. Because they could send

updates—sometimes called “tweets”—not only from

their computers but from their phones, too, people also

Twittered that they were bumping into Robert DeNiro at

In-N-Out Burger, stuck in traffic on Route 1, or boarding

a plane for Zimbabwe.

Although status updates like that may sound mun-

dane, people on Twitter have found that becoming

aware of what your friends, family, and colleagues are

doing (without having to respond) leads to a lightweight ...