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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."

For a service that is remarkably simple, Twitter is often difficult for new users to understand and to quickly turn into something useful. In fact, the simplicity of Twitter can actually be a barrier in the beginning, because there's not much to help a new user get started. So, we've put together this guide, which will help you understand the basic jargon of Twitter, find a good set of Twitter add-ons to streamline and strengthen your Twitter experience, and give you a list of 100 technology experts who are active on Twitter and are worth following.

"Because social-networking tools are forums for personalized, socially focused conversations, the communities that spring from these tools are person/people-centered. As Porter explained, this person/people-centeredness results in the value of participation being opaque for anyone who is not participating. To address this problem, we made sure that students who chose not to participate (because the value of participation is opaque for them) had access to our tweets by incorporating an RSS feed-like Twitter widget in our LMS. (See Figure 5.) Many widgets like these can be found online, although we should note that this particular widget has limitations. As seen in the example in Figure 5, the widget only displays Joni's posts, not the back-and-forth exchanges between her and members of her network. Students might incorrectly assume that the interaction is one-sided and less than dynamic. Besides keeping students apprised of the resources we shared via Twitter, however, this widget allowed them to vicariously discover Twitter's value. Some students later chose to join us in Twitter because they had a better understanding of what they were getting into because its value was less opaque. Ultimately, we found that Twitter helped us achieve our student-engagement objective, but we also quickly discovered that students' Twitter participation led to other notable instructional outcomes."

Some tips for twittering from the marketing point of view. Relevant ideas to building a PLN too.

UT Dallas History Professor Dr. Monica Rankin, @monicarankin, wanted to know how she could reach and include more students in the class discussion. She had heard of Twitter... The following is a short video describing her "Twitter Experiment" in the classroom with comments from students about the pros and cons of Twitter in a traditional learning environment.

twhirl is a social software desktop client, based on the Adobe AIR platform. Some of twhirl's features: * runs on both Windows (2000/XP/Vista) and Mac OSX * connects to multiple Twitter, laconi.ca, Friendfeed and seesmic accounts * notifications on new messages * shorten long URLs (using snurl, twurl or is.gd) * cross-post twitter updates to Pownce and Jaiku * post images to TwitPic * search tweets using Twitter Search and TweetScan * timeline filtering * color schemes * automatically check for new versions There are a lot more things twhirl can do to improve your twitter experience, and it offers various configuration options to adapt to your personal needs.

Tweet Speaker. Listen to Twitter Enjoy Twitter while on a walk, stuck in traffic, in the kitchen, or on the go. Tweet Speaker lets you listen to news, sports, humor, and the musings of interesting people on Twitter - a sort of live podcast of your Tweets. Featuring a beautiful user interface, speech tailored for tweets, Tweet Marker support, adjustable reading speed, and Airplay, Tweet Speaker is a fun new way to experience Twitter.

Twittering and texting may be the way to go in an emergency, given landline and cellular phone networks were heavily congested as callers jammed the lines, creating frustration for some users who had difficulty getting calls through.

filesharing through twitter

Tweetcube is another service that adds additional functionality to Twitter. If you have been following MakeUseOf for some time you probably already know how to post voice messages, images and even sharing what you're listening to. TweetCube brings a new feature to your Twitter experience by letting you easily share files.

HootSuite is the ultimate Twitter toolbox. With HootSuite, you can manage multiple Twitter profiles, pre-schedule tweets, and measure your success. HootSuite lets you manage your entire Twitter experience from one easy-to-use interface.

Slices is a completely new Twitter experience. With the world's first Twitter directory, Live Event streams, and Timeline Slicer, it's simply a better way to discover Twitter. What's your Slice?

Twitter told developers explicitly that they should stop making third-party clients. According to Twitter, Repeated privacy policy violations and an inconsistent user experience are the reasons for implementing these restrictions.

5 tools for twitter reviewed. I had already seen some of theme.

'The Physical Internet' as a buzz phrase has been thrown about a fair bit recently and only really recently have I seen things start to get interesting. I really like the idea of making the internet tangible and a flipside to this is taking a real world interaction and broadcasting this onto the net. A few things have made this much more attainable -> 1) Twitter and other systems have opened up to let other systems interact through them via an API to send/retrieve data. 2) Electronics such as arduino or ioBridge have made the geeky electronics bit much easier. 3) Programming interfaces such as Processing or Openframeworks have made the geeky programming bit much easier. Here is a little recap of some interesting/useful/useless/fun interfaces.

Facebook may be the social medium of choice for college students, but the microblogging Web tool Twitter has found adherents among professors, many of whom are starting to experiment with it as a teaching device.

I'm not sure who set this up, but it says "This is just an idea, or an experiment. If you are an educator using Twitter, you are more than welcome to join! "