The Twitter explosion includes business users and academic colleagues. 'Twitter' is a piece of social networking software, and anyone with an internet connection can sign up for a free account. This will establish their unique ‘username’, and they will then be able to begin the process of ‘following’ people.
Some Twitter Jargon
Like all things techical, Twitter users are developing their own shorthand way of talking about what they do. 'Following', and being followed by 'followers', are obvious - but people are also beginning to talk of 'tweets',and 'embedding urls'.
- ‘Following’ is not at all sinister (not at all like ‘stalking’) – it simply means that the new user will receive ‘tweets’ from the person or people they are following. (Obviously the newbie must know the username of at least one other person to begin the process.)
- Once people realize they are being followed they have the opportunity to return the favour and follow in return. This rapidly builds a huge network of disparate, interconnected, individuals. (The first person follows a second, the second follows 40 more people, and each of them follows … and so on.)
- ‘Tweets’ are limited to 140 characters, so the messages are necessarily very brief – but that means that they can be dashed off very quickly. Links to websites can be embedded in the message (using a cunning system that reduces the number of characters used up), which can increase the information content of any message enormously.
Growth of Twitter
Originally this social networking tool was used more in fun than in any serious way. In the beginning people would ‘tweet’ their friends to tell them what they were having for breakfast, what their pet was doing, or simply how they felt.
- Soon it was realised that the ability to embed links to things in a message allowed users to share the more interesting results of their internet browsing with their friends, and this started to add a new dimension.
- More serious use became possible when groups of academic colleagues (possibly located in distant parts of the world) started to share up-to-date information, by passing on information to one-another in the form of links to websites carrying new stuff.
- Business users soon realized that their people could be instantly, and simultaneously, given the link to any relevant document that had been uploaded to the web.
These two last uses (colleagues sharing interesting snippets, and business users pointing to documents) have led to a phenomenal growth in the number ‘twitterers’.
Overloading Networks
Some people have a large number of followers (Stephen Fry, for example, currently has well over 200,000, and he follows more than 50,000). When Stephen mentioned a particular website recently it crashed with too much traffic – almost instantly!
Future of Twitter
Who can say what the future will look like? But it is fair to say that Twitter has ‘come of age’ and is now finding a wide variety of (previously un-thought of) uses. Maybe educational establishments will be the next to use it – sending out information to students, or perhaps medics passing on new information about procedures or upcoming epidemics. Who knows!
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