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

19 : Twitter and the Micro-Messaging Revolution

A New Kind of Communication

One measure of Twitter’s success is in the numbers:

today, the company has north of three million users,

and it’s growing rapidly: the number of public users rose

516% from October 23, 2007 to October 23, 2008.

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And some estimates put its traffic at about a million

messages a day, routing to people all over the world.

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But perhaps more significant is the fact that Twitter,

which has no revenue yet (nor even an announced

business model), has inspired a number of similar

services (see the box on page 26).

Some clones confine your updates to the Web,

others allow for updates of more than 140 characters,

and a few have features like file-attachments. But they

all share a few characteristics: 1) They encourage or

require you to write short messages, which is some-

what like texting (also known as SMS); 2) they send your

messages instantly, which is somewhat like texting,

emailing, IMing, or even blogging; 3) they require people

to sign up for each other’s updates, which is somewhat

like signing up for RSS feeds or friending people on

a social network; and 4) most micro-messages require

no response (somewhat like blogging).

In short, these services combine many of the best

features of other familiar communication systems to

create an exciting and useful new thing (more later on

how this neophyte medium can help comba ...