What the Twitter?

Sometimes things hit you with several punches at once.

I was listening to an episode of the „six pixels of separation“ podcast by Mitch Joel, and just before I came home he praised twitter. Half an hour later, on his blog, I found a post about twitter, and then, later while going through my feeds, I found another post by Adpulp about twitter.

So what is it? As Mitch Joel writes, …

It’s being called a micro-Blogging platform. […] Simply put you can send a text message (SMS length) either through a website, instant messenger or mobile device to your own customized Twitter page.

There are many people now, who constantly update twitter (and with twitter-widgets, this also appears on their blogs). I am not sure why peole would do that. But Mitch has some thoughts on this:

As consumers take more control of the media, these individuals are building tremendous personal brands and the people who are connected to these personal brands want more connections and information. Twitter takes this idea and brings it down to the core: what is that person doing right now. Imagine how many millions of people buy magazines to read about their favorite celebrity. Now imagine if those celebrities were using Twitter. Micro-chunks of information that keeps everybody in their loop.

And then, again not much later, I find that Meish muses about twitter and classifies some profiles of twitterers (is that what they’re called?)

• The Briefers, who provide only bulletins relating to current location or status. Example: Waiting for the bus. Cold.
• The Detailers, who use Twitter to give an insight into what they’re thinking, eating, listening to, looking forward to, planning, and so on. Example: Wondering what to have for tea tonight. Pasta, maybe.
• The Kitchen Sinkers, who use Twitter as a new form of blogging, recording thoughts and links and opinions and ideas, addressed to no-one in particular. Example: Traffic lights broken at the corner of high street. Phoned work and told them I’ll be late. That’s the fourth time this week. Sigh.
• The Pongers, who respond publically to other users whose updates they are receiving via Twitter (so called because they return each IM ping with a pong). Example: @Jim: Hahaha! Yes!

But it’s not just for people. Technorati and Google News also have twitter channels.

As if blogs, MySpace profiles, videos on YouTube, podcasts and everything else is not enough already. Now we can let the whole world know what we’re doing – every minute of the day.

I like blogs, and I publish some of my photos on flickr. But that’s about as far as I would go. Not sure why I would want to tell everyone about my whereabouts all the time…