Twitter has been voted last year as the most popular word by Global Language Monitor.
It actually means, as a verb, to utter a succession of tremulous sounds or to talk rapidly of trivial matters. But, of late, it refers to the popular social networking site (http://twitter.com) used by millions worldwide.
In the course of a year, registered Twitter accounts have reportedly grown more than 1,500 per cent and the Twitter team of professionals has grown 500 per cent. In today's times, it is no mean feat!
Apart from the regular, full-time employees working at the Twitter offices, there are thousands of dedicated platform developers who have now created more than 70,000 registered Twitter applications creating variety and utility for all.
I salute the dedicated professionals who have been responsible for the incredible success of the website. My blogpost also is in celebration of the gathering of such individuals this spring at 'Chirp', the first ever official Twitter developer conference.
When I had joined Twitter, I remember doing so out of sheer curiosity. Already it was having a roaring fanbase. I was intrigued by the fact that the highest celebrity status was enjoyed in Twitterdom by Ashton Kutcher, thanks to his outpourings followed by a mindbogglingly wide range of people from all over!
What I like about Twitter:
It is free, like most of the social networking sites that enjoy immense popularity online.
It offers microblogging services, enabling its users to send and read messages known as tweets. For the uninitiated: tweets are the text-based posts (of up to 140 characters); the tweets are displayed on the author's profile page and are delivered to the author's subscribers who are known as followers. Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends or, by default, allow open access.
Some Interesting Facts About Twitter:
*The 7 billion tweets to date are composed of 104,860,000,000 words!
*This time last year, i.e. in February 2009, adults aged 35-49 years had the largest representation on Twitter – almost 3 million unique visitors from this age group, which is 42 per cent of the entire contributors of Tweets!
*5% of all Twitter accounts create 75% of all tweets; now that is weird, but interesting!
*The cool, new features of note that make Twitter even more attractive are the inclusion of list creation, easy & faster spread information with a retweet button, and an easier way to activate one's mobile phone to work with Twitter over SMS.
*We are also lucky to be offered a new mobile website that looks and works much better on smart phones.
Happy tweet-ing, folks!
Follow me HERE: http://twitter.com/sakagaze
8 comments:
The Twitter quitters (i.e. those who are opposed to the concept of twittering) are far outnumbered by those who are hooked on to the joys of posting & sharing tweets!
Twitter celebrates the old age: "Brevity is the soul of wit."
I think the reason Twitter has become so popular, in such a short span, is that it is much like SMSing - something that is universally indulged in, thanks to the mammoth ilk of mobile-phone users.
Twitter has made even the RSS feeds redundant; I love its comprehensive ability to reach out with a sense of intimate immediacy. It is rare to find such unique combo on a social networking platform, that of being non-invasive (the privacy options lets us enjoy that) and, yet, being thoroughly impulse-driven (as good as gossiping, on anything-under-the-sun).
First, everyone was Twittering, and now everyone is talking about Twittering.....
Let me confess, I do not warm up to the idea of telling the world what I'm doing,
eating,
thinking,
excreting, who I've been sleeping with kinda nonsense.
Now it is not just a matter of public image build-up, I recently overheard a guy saying recently to a friend that he is unlikely to even get a girlfriend unless he has a Twitter account! What depravity!
Thanks for the timely post.
Twitter's popularity is soaring! Whether we like it or not..... Twitter is basking in the glory of just having crossed the ten billionth tweet milestone, and the popularity is ever-rising!!!!
Personally, I prefer Facebook & Orkut, and even Youtube, to Twitter. But I have to admit that 'tweeting' is pretty neat a concept. Many do not want to go through the huge amounts of personal chatter on blogs, and yet want a quick update on diverse interests of theirs, for them Twitter is ideal. It gives the commoners to rub shoulders, virtually of course, with the royalty (read celebrities) and hence feel privileged and intimate without threat of the famous men and women actually being hounded or stalked.
People get to vent their repressed feelings and at the same time have a reality check through the feedback from their followers.
Twittering/Tweeting is here to stay for a while, at par with the extensive blogging or other such pet passions of the netizens.
Twittering seems to have taken the fancy of all and sundry. Starting from politicians to actors to the next door neighbor, social networking, and esp the abbreviated version (twittering) seems to have won them all. Even the so called 'unsocial" beings have a very social identity on these sites! Well, I would try to refrain from being judgmental...but as long as the small lil bird sings songs of your heart, reaches out to people with your thoughts..its quite a connecting experience!!
♥!!♥TWITTER♥!!♥...
can never echo the heart's chatter...
the heart speaks in many different ways....♥!!♥
but never wishes to condense the content ♥!!♥
nor looks forward to some form of public announcement for the world.
♥!!♥That's what I consider the limitation of tweeting/twittering!
♥!!♥
The worst bit about Twittering/Tweeting is the fact that several celebrities who have profiles on Twitter alright but lack the enterprise or energy to keep post their personal tweets choose to use ghost writers to do the same, especially to heighten their celebrity-worth and publicize their products or services, and widen the professional reach!
When it came into being, in 2007, who would have thought that TWITTER would be so huge a phenomenon!
Sharing of information on a global platform, with Tweets limited to 140 characters of text or links, and accessed and made use of from a variety of devices including any mobile phone, Macs, or PCs, makes Twitter so widely popular. Microblogging is here to stay (thanks to users and readers with limited attention span) and Twitter is sure to go a long way in catapulting change in all ways (as has been evident in India during the IPL tweets courtesy Shashi Tharoor, Lalit Modi, Shah Rukh Khan and others).
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