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

9 : Twitter and the Micro-Messaging Revolution

User-Generated Features

User-generated content—material submitted by web-

site visitors—is a major theme of Web 2.0 sites. Twitter

has helped the trend evolve to include user-generated

features. Presented with very short messages and an

unadorned service for delivering them, Twitter’s users

have developed conventions that stand in for features.

The first such feature to appear was the “@” symbol

followed by a username, which users organically

created to let people reply or refer to another user

on Twitter. Here’s how it works: imagine Biz Stone, a

co-founder of Twitter, were to send a message asking,

“Can anyone recommend a vegan restaurant on the

Upper East Side?” People who see his message can

address him in reply, making clear that the message

is for him: “@Biz: try Candle Café on 3rd & 75th.”

Twitter does have a built-in feature, “direct messages”

(or DMs), for sending one-to-one notes. But DMs keep

communication private, and both parties must be

following each other for it to work. If you want to have

a public conversation or one with multiple participants,

or if you want to send a message to somebody who

isn’t following you, the @[username] convention is

the way to go.

Jack Dorsey, a company co-founder, says that when

he conceived of Twitter, he didn’t expect people to use

it much for conversation. Instead, he thought it would ...