Technician Online

August 21st, 2008

Better than your Facebook status

You checked your e-mail. You added Thomas Jones, changed your status and wrote on Katie’s wall. You changed your AIM away message. Now what?

It’s the question some ask themselves: How else can I tell the world exactly what I’m doing, all the time?

The answer: Twitter.

Twitter, the site exclusively for those who can’t get enough of status updates, has become a new phenomenon among the Web-savvy.

Imagine your Facebook news feed, but solely with status updates and replies to your friends. It’s all updates, all the time.

But it’s not a blog.

You get 140 characters per entry, and no more. And that includes punctuation and spaces. There’s hardly room to include URLs to Youtube videos or New York Times articles, so Twitter automatically changes long links to “Tiny URLs,” which are shortcuts to the links, to allow for more room in your posts.

Twitter makes it easy to keep up with your fellow Tweeple, too. You can “follow” friends, and they can follow you too. Following someone allows his or her updates to list on your home page. And if you like, you can even “@reply” to them, but again, only if you keep it to 140 characters.

While Twitter lacks the fluff that Facebook and MySpace thrive on, like walls, photos and applications, Twitter makes up for it in simplicity. A clean, uncluttered design makes the site easily navigable for its users.

However, the site is relatively new (it got its start in July of 2006). Twitter is growing in popularity, but the servers can’t seem to keep up with all of its more than 2 million users. If you decide to tweet, expect to see the Twitter “fail whale” — an illustration of a whale being lifted out of the ocean by signature Twitter birds — during the occasional down time.

On the other hand, Twitter isn’t usually down for long, and you can always post a rant about the outage when it gets back up. The updates just keep rolling.

(by Susannah Brinkley)

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 21st, 2008 at 12:17 am and is filed under Uncategorized, Science & Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.