Twittering for Geeks

Why on earth would anybody want to use a mobile phone to let the world know they are eating a pizza with friends, are down at the gym, or have just arrived somewhere by airplane?

Microblogging, as supported by Twitter or the free identi.ca variant, has some really amazing side effects. If you want to find out what the hottest issues are for humankind right at this moment, neither Google's search engine nor Wikipedia are likely to help. Take a look at the Twitter service front page (Figure 1) and you'll see people tweeting about local political upheavals, natural phenomena, the latest movie, or sports events – often long before the daily paper's editorial team or the TV channels have even noticed something is going on.

Fragile Giant

The fact that Twitter works at all is something close to a miracle. The service offers just minimal functionality, and its infrastructure is so fragile that breakdowns are just part of the daily grind. Yet 6 million users untiringly keep feeding the fragile beast news, continuously infuse new life in the form of brand new information, and thus have kept it alive and breathing since 2006. The Twitter team is reluctant to add new functionality; in fact, this typically only occurs when faithful Twitter fans have discovered hair-raising creative workarounds to eke new functions out of the gentle giant.

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