Twitter

Estimates of the number of daily users vary as the company does not release the number of active accounts. In November 2008, Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester Research estimated that Twitter had 4-5 million users.[2] A February 2009 Compete.com blog entry ranks Twitter as the third largest social network (MySpace would be second and Facebook would be the largest in the world[3]), and puts the number of users at roughly 6 million and the number of monthly visitors at 55 million.Wikipedia article

I mentioned a few weeks ago that Colleen Lin had explained Twitter to me in a way that I could understand. Months and months ago I got an account and since then hadn't been seeing past the individual dig-me side of it. I'd heard reports of how the server crashed when millions of people went to it for updates on people and events during a natural disaster. I think it was the tsunami or fires in CA. In any case, the way to understand its value is as a resource to short bursts of information. You get 140 characters for your message. As I type this, I've been following Colleen's tweets. She's at what appears to be a conference re: social networking software. She's tweeting - short bursts of text - about what the panelists and presenters are saying. She had sent me a list of people using Twitter so that I might follow some to see who I connect with. And she recommended Tweetie, a $2.99 app I got from the iTunes App Store for my iPhone.

Who else is Tweeting? Edustyle has a list of academic social networking sites. Down the page are colleges and universities who use Twitter to push into out to anyone interested enough in following them. Okay you UA folks. True or false, the UA has a Twitter site? To quote Lily Von Schtupp, "it's twue.... it's twue!" I am sure that the tweets are coming out of UA News. If you visit the UA's Twitter site, you'll see links to UA News articles. BTW, I see that the UA's Twitter has 639 followers. Followers are people who are subscribing to the site's RSS feeds.

So, if you're still reading this entry you have a good idea of some of the reasons that Twitter is popular. Sure you can use it to connect to family, friends, colleagues, organizations and groups with similar interests. Read that Wikipedia article to ingest more examples. I have a lot more to learn about Twitter, tweeting, ...