The one thing you can say for certain about Twitter is that it makes a terrible first impression. You hear about this new service that lets you send 140-character updates to your "followers," and you think, Why does the world need this, exactly? It's not as if we were all sitting around four years ago scratching our heads and saying, "If only there were a technology that would allow me to send a message to my 50 friends, alerting them in real time about my choice of breakfast cereal."
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I, too, was skeptical at first. I had met Evan Williams, Twitter's co-creator, a couple of times in the dotcom '90s when he was launching Blogger.com. Back then, what people worried about was the threat that blogging posed to our attention span, with telegraphic, two-paragraph blog posts replacing long-format articles and books. With Twitter, Williams w
"Injecting Twitter into that conversation fundamentally changed the rules of engagement. It added a second layer of discussion and brought a wider audience into what would have been a private exchange. And it gave the event an afterlife on the Web. Yes, it was built entirely out of 140-character messages, but the sum total of those tweets added up to something truly substantive, like a suspension bridge made of pebbles."
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The one thing you can say for certain about Twitter is that it makes a
terrible first impression. You hear about this new service that lets you send
140-character updates to your "followers," and you think, Why does the world
need this, exactly? It's not as if we were all sitting around four years ago
scratching our heads and saying, "If only there were a technology that would
allow me to send a message to my 50 friends, alerting them in real time about my
choice of breakfast cereal."
Related
Audio
Host Katherine Lanpher talks with TIME's Just Fox on stocks vs. bonds and
Barbara Kiviat about the housing market's new movement
Download
|
Subscribe
Specials
The World
of Twitter
Specials
Top 10
Celebrity Twitter Feeds
Specials
10
Ways Twitter Will Change American Business
Stories
The
TIME 100: The Twitter Guys by Ashton Kutcher
More Related
The
TIME 100: The Twitter Guys by Ashton Kutcher
The
TIME 100: The Twitter Guys by Ashton Kutcher
The
Future of Twitter
I, too, was skeptical at first. I had met Evan Williams, Twitter's
co-creator, a couple of times in the dotcom '90s when he was launching
Blogger.com. Back then, what people worried about was the threat that blogging
posed to our attention span, with telegraphic, two-paragraph blog posts
replacing long-format articles and books. With Twitter, Williams w