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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."

Twups is a twitter aggregator, pulling the most popular twitter topics into one place, so you can keep up to date on what is going on in the world, via twitter. We also make it super easy to reply directly to a tweet, or even retweet something you find on Twups directly from your Twitter account. All topics can be found via category or alphabetically, you can also do a quick search. You can also suggest topics via our

"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."

Would you like to talk to your Twitter friends or set up a spontaneous conference call? Normally you'd have to agree to hook up over Skype or something else. But soon you could be making calls via Twitter. After signing in with your Twitter name and password you select how the call will be carried, either via browser, SIP ID or number/Mobile Phone. You then plug in your friend's Twitter name and generate a "Phweet" which is a unique shortURL for sharing the call with one or more people.

A Phweet is a shortURL that makes it easy to conduct voice conversations and conference calls between Twitter friends. You don't need to create a new account to use Phweet. Simply sign in with your Twitter username and password. thanks to Beth Kanter

Script that sends a twitter update when people view your webpage. If you have a very busy site, this might be a lot! Suggested to use a separate twitter account for this data.

Facebook Pages are becoming a lot more like Twitter in terms of the ways marketers can use them to reach and engage people inside Facebook. Twitter has proven that the "status update subscription + news feed" conversation model works well for a variety of marketers - from large brands to self promoters like bloggers, consultants, and real estate agents.

Tweagle is a sleek Twitter client combining the best of Twitter and Foursquare. With Tweagle, users can listen to the voice of the city and easily share their location via Foursquare, checking in and tweeting at the same time.

The Multimap twitter bot helps you to access the same maps, directions and local information that you find on multimap.com by simply sending direct messages via twitter. You can send a message to fetch local information such as the closest ATM, tourist attraction, park, cinema, theatre or even find entries on wikipedia about what is nearby.

Show your Twitter friends on a map that can be easily added to your blog's sidebar. There's more information at http://www.mmmeeja.com/blog/social-networking/twitter-followers-map.html via @cnansen

How to get and set reminders using twitter.

How to get and set reminders on twitter using the user "timer."

'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.

Google and Twitter are now becoming connected via Google Friend Connect.

call your contacts on twitter

Tweet Blender is tag-aware and has support for multiple authors, lists, hashtags, and keywords all blended together. The plugin can show tweets from just one user or a list of users (as all other Twitter plugins do); however, it can also show tweets for a topic which you can define via Twitter hashtag or keyword. But there is more! It can also show tweets for multiple authors AND multiple lists AND multiple keywords AND multiple hashtags all blended together into a single stream.

Twitter in the classroom

Excellent article on how companies are using Twitter. I wonder if the Zappos CEO read this article and that's why he's now on Twitter! Also, I think I now want the title Community Evangelist. That's a job title the certainly didn't exist 20 years ago!

A teacher who used twitter on a field trip. This is a a neat idea. It would be great to harness the power of cell phones to capture observations and then return to school to debrief.

A teacher who used twitter on a field trip. This is a a neat idea. It would be great to harness the power of cell phones to capture observations and then return to school to debrief.

Thanks @dougsymington via @sleslie