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Evan Williams and Biz Stone of Twitter Robyn Twomey for TIME ENLARGE + Print Reprints Email Twitter Linkedin Buzz up! (44) Facebook MORE... Add to my: del.icio.us Technorati reddit Google Bookmarks Mixx StumbleUpon Blog this on: TypePad LiveJournal Blogger MySpace 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

"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."

Abstract: Social network sites (SNSs) are increasingly attracting the attention of academic and industry researchers intrigued by their affordances and reach. This special theme section of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication brings together scholarship on these emergent phenomena. In this introductory article, we describe features of SNSs and propose a comprehensive definition. We then present one perspective on the history of such sites, discussing key changes and developments. After briefly summarizing existing scholarship concerning SNSs, we discuss the articles in this special section and conclude with considerations for future research.

This video brings home the point that most people are oblivious to the social networking tools I use. In this video, NYU journalism student Alana Taylor took it to the streets asking students and other passersby whether they use Facebook, Flickr and Twitter.

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