If the digital revolution is to rival the Industrial Revolution in significance, it will require a lot more than technology. It will require investment, patience and entrepreneurs who care more about building something of value than trying to make a quick buck. One management lesson…seems to be that…a promising technology often takes time to percolate through trial, error and refinement before it comes to fruition.—Steve Lohr, NYTimes.com

Teens are eating up Facebook but are not so keen on Twitter, and they ar enot blogging as much as they used to, according to the Pew Internet Project's report.—Mary Brophy Marcus, USA TODAY

140 Characters

(or less)

What Are You Doing?

...er, um...

What's Happening?

"What we have to do is deliver to people the best and freshest most relevant information possible. We think of Twitter as it's not a social network, but it's an information network. It tells people what they care about as it is happening in the world."—Evan Williams, CEO

Used in campaigning, legal proceedings, education, emergencies, protests and politics, public relations, reporting descent, space exploration and survey opinion... Twitter.

In the middle of the first decade of the 21st Century with two wars at the epicenter of staggering national debt constantly ballooning, the United States of America in economic tumult yearned to redefine itself while renewing its image in the eyes of the world.

And then something came buzzing: "short burst of inconsequential information" has been chirping like a bird since created by Jack Dorsey in 2006 and headquartered in San Francisco, California. The mobile social network service and micro-blogging with 74 employees is anticipated to generate for fiscal year 2009 nearly a half million dollars in projected revenue.

The micro-blogging social network allows users to send and read text-based posts—Tweets—written in 140 characters or less together with a profile of the author (by actual name or non de plume) and an avatar showing a photographic ID of some sort; typically a representation or graphic illustration manifested in a square set apart from the text. Pornography displayed here on the author's page is prohibited, however nudity is allowed.

Subscribers known as followers are delivered messages from the author but deliveries if preferred can be restricted to a circle of followers unless open access is desired. Of course, users send / receive "Tweets" by way of www.twitter.com. All this blogging and networking cost nothing to use, but the Short Message Service or SMS is an external applications and could incur phone service provider fees.

Gaining popularity worldwide, sending and receiving these short text messages emphasized news and information, prompting the company to change its prompt for updates from "What are you doing?"(banal) to "What's happening?".

Jenna Johnson of the Washington Post (10/13/09 edition) alleged that some Tweeters "smugly just wanting to be followed." Of course, what people like Ms Johnson fail to realize is that a person like Arnold Schwarzenegger following 112,190 is mostly reading. The various posts actually divide between "readers" and "writers"; the readers pretty much follows the writers. Anyone attempting to do BOTH doesn't really have a life. And those who practically live off the site are virtual zombies.

An individual message limited to 140 characters written in gonzo shorthand presents "ppl" (people) and "btw" (by the way) with a big difference between the anacronym "lmao" (laughing my ass off) and "lmaoo" (get out of my face now); and, of course, the iconic "lol" (Do I really have to spell this one out?)

Risk of annoyingly over-tweeting  followers that they will "drop" your post by un-following or blocking (if not frequently, at the very least unexpectedly) is as much a part of being on the site as ranting on about some ephemeral issue. Readers (not writers) mostly copy (cut-and-paste) headlines to articles, fashion these into a Tweets after (or before) slapping on a link to the online text; or set up an RSS feed automatically linking the relevant news item.

For the most part, readers (followers) re-tweeting information to other followers and writers (the followed) by and large just constantly sending shout-outs to their followers. Got it?

The pecking order is not quite a food-chain but a sort of cast system that evolves overtime as loyalties and temporary interests come and go, social and political leanings become entrenched, and trending topics shift from day to day.

And yet once you have an audience, there's never too much time you can spend reaching out. That is the sum and substance of this growing technology-addiction.

"Ordinary people conveying useless information" is one way a writer for the Washington Post described those honing their commenting skills as micro-bloggers for an audience made up of attention deficit disorder, the newsy and the nosy, the moronically stupid and the educated fool among others presumably higher on the food-chain. Some words are witty, though most are... well, ordinary people conveying useless information like attention-starved lab rats.

Many of the Tweets may sound sort of like fun and even happy but mostly they're pretty biting and bitter, quite often even angry. If you ask: Why the anger? Guess you don't get out much.

In cyberspace, nothing about our lives is private. Are you proud of what you've posted thus far on the Internet? The language you've used, events in your life you've described tucked away inside your personnel jacket...

Employers caring more deeply about an applicant's background will access credit reports, how the prospective employee pays bills—and, yes, social networking activities. What text and photos are upload are becoming prerequisite for a job application.

Nowadays, not only deeds but words and visuals posted on web sites as well as all things subject to turn up on search engines matter. For a fact, what happens on social networks do not stay there. Whatever happened, will it show you in the best possible light and possibly show up in your next job interview? Uh-oh.

Some potential employers require applicants to hand over user names and passwords for all social networking... or you need not apply. They might even take a look at that tattoo.

Extraordinary power to distribute information and sway opinion of a large group in a small amount of time, the service itself is free. Funding has come from new investors Insight Venture Partners and T Rowe Price, as well as existing backers Institutional Venture Partners, Spark Capital and Benchmark Capital. October 22, 2009, the New York Times reported that two back-to-back deals hinted at possible revenue in making the company's real-time steady stream of text available to the search engines of Microsoft and Google. In any event, such deals would not be exclusive.

The web traffic ranked among the more popular worldwide, Twitter estimated daily users is unknowable since the company does not release the number of active accounts, but analysis has it that the service is 3rd most used with 55 million global visitors. On the upside, in 2009 considered the fastest-growing site on the Internet followed by Facebook. On the downside, only 40 percent of Twitter's users are retained.

Accelerated by the popularity of smart phones, social networks have the side-effect of breaking down our interpersonal relationships and limiting our attention span to 140 characters.

So, if you find your less patient... well, there you go.

Frederick Louis Richardson

(on Twitter: @Spirit_Walking)

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