What Are You Doing With Twitter?

I recently signed up for Twitter, a new service alot like dodgeball. And no not the dodgeball from gymclass. Twitter is a global community of friends and strangers answering one simple question: What are you doing?

If you haven’t tried it yet, Twitter is a service that allows you to post one-line messages about what you’re currently doing—via the web interface, IM, or textmessage. You can limit who sees the messages to people you’ve added to your buddy list, or you can make the messages public. It serves as a mini blog with nano messages. Twitter merges a number of interesting trends in social software usage—personal blogging, lightweight presence indicators, and IM status messages, public and private. It reminds me of my old textamerica account, in which I would post images from my cell phone to the account, which would then show up on my homepage. It also sounds alot like the feeling I got when I realized I could post to my blog or flickr from my cellphone. This hysteria around twitter reminds me of the early days of blogger. But it sounds alot like the text messages on my cinguar cellphone from myspace and facebook.. I dont know if I need a whole new service to do what the facebook feed does for me and my friends now.. “Friends” still isn’t the right word.

Like a good party, if your friends are not on Twitter or you arent particularly voyeuristic.., I can’t imagine it would be that interesting. The sad reality is there can be only one true answer to the question: “I’m typing to tell twitter what I’m doing right now…” Twitter seems to work equally well for busy people and not-busy people. It allows folks with little time to keep up with what their friends are up to without having to email and IM with them all day.

Twitterholic tracks the top 100 Twitter users in terms of followers. This does seem like a grade school popularity contest. And in a way it is.. Scoble is at the top of the list.. to be expected, we all know he has an open door policy about adding the masses to his friends list.

twittervision .a world tour of recent Twitter messages. Just sit back and watch the updates come in one at a time, displayed on a world map.

There is a wordpress widget also.

If you want to twitter me, check http://twitter.com/jessesaves



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