Twitter Mania at SXSW

Posted on March 11, 2007

There is a lot of buzz lately about Twitter, which is a new mobile communications service from Obvious. Twitter lets you establish a page on twitter.com and update it from a mobile phone, IM or webpage with short messages about what you are currently doing. If you set up a page on Twitter you can send an SMS to Twitter and it will update your page. You can also update your page from the web or by sending an instant message. Twitter can be useful for telling people where you are going or communicating with a group of friends. The SXSW conference even had its own Twitter account set up.

The Twitter blog notes that even presidential candidate John Edwards is twittering. John Edwards seems to be trying out every Web 2.0 service he can.

Mashable has created a funny graphic called the evolution of blogging, cat version. It shows blogging move from Blogger (posts about what the cat is doing), to Flickr (cat photos), to YouTube (cat videos) and finally to Twitter which shows brief text messages about what the cat is doing every couple minutes.

Twitter is a not really an evolution of blogging. It is a much shorter form of blogging using SMS messages. Twitter entries are much shorter than most blogger entries. A twitter entry can only be up to 140 characters in length. We don't yet know how many twitters people will be willing to send or receive before it reaches a Twitter annoyance threshold. What's clear is that Twitter has the potential for both very useful and very annoying uses.