MICRO-BLOGGERS OF THE WORLD KEEP IT SHORT By Chris Nuttall
Monday, April 23, 2007
At Twittervision.com the beginnings of what could be a fresh trend in internet self-expression are being spelt out on a map of the world.
Users of this addictive new website can see a text bubble flash up over the state of Arizona with a picture icon of the sender "Chilblane" inside. "Resetting all of my album art," it says. The world map spins over to Sydney, Australia: "Waiting on my girlfriend to come," says CJH2. Then to Tokyo: "Keep snoozing, can't start my day yet," says Nobi. "Twitter - the reality TV of the blogosphere," comments LoveHouseRadio back in Richmond, Virginia.
Twittervision's pop-up bubbles of instant texted thoughts from around the world are a "mash-up" of Google Maps combined with a live feed of the short messages sent out by users of Twitter.com's service.
Its popularity has forced its creator, David Troy, to create a periodic warning to people who have been glued to their computer monitors for long periods: "You have been watching Twittervision for 12 hours. Do you want to continue?"
Mr Troy pays homage to Twitter - the original service that created the online ecosystem of which Twitter-vision.com is part – for helping create the phenomenon of text messages that turn into web television.
The service was launched last year to let people post brief messages to groups of friends and the public at large, letting them know their current actions and thoughts.
It has rapidly become the poster child of a new trend of micro-blogging, where the social networking tool is reduced to single sentences, pictures and the most everyday emotions and events.
Besides Twitter, another internet tool called Tumblr is enabling scrapbook-style blogs of pasted quotes,pictures and thoughts. Radar.net creates social connections through the posting of camera phone images. And services such as Jaiku, Mozes and Moodgeist have their own take on this new form of web shorthand.
Twitter was invented by Jack Dorsey, a developer at Obvious Corp, a San Francisco start-up. He thought of mashing up existing concepts such as groups of friends and instant messaging (for example: "I'm away from my desk") and MySpace-style "I'm listening to ColdPlay" status messages. The resulting service allows users to let each other know what they are doing, wherever they are, through mobile phone SMS text messages.
Twitter users tend to update their status from their computers during the day and their phones at night. In each case they are restricted to 140-character messages.
"I really like that constraint. I'm a person of few words. I really like conciseness and making every word count," Mr Dorsey says.
He feels that Twitter messages avoid the abstraction and commitment of composed blog posts and free people from the obligations of technologies such as the phone and e-mail, where responses are expected in a timely manner.
"Twitter is more ambient," he says. "You are basically writing on a wall and if someone chooses to read it they can do."
Hitwise, the web research firm, says visits to Twitter.com in March were up 135 per cent on the previous month and 500 per cent on January, but they have yet to reach critical mass.
Lee Ann Prescott, research director of Hitwise, says Twitter is entertaining but users are still trying to find useful applications for it.
"This is still really niche. It takes a lot of time for a network like this to build," she says.
Tumblr has attracted 50,000 users so far and 10,000 posts an hour are coming into its micro-blogs. Users can press a Tumblr button in their browser to attachto their blogs a video,photo, quote or link they find while surfing or to post a random thought.
"This is going to be the year of short form," says David Karp, Tumblr's founder. "Blogs are great if you want to hammer out commentary, but what if you're not particularly comfortable as a writer? There are a lot of people who just want to share stuff and we wanted to make a simple, shallow funnel for them."
With Radar.net's postings of camera phone pictures, users don't even have to write. "Pictures have an entirely different feeling," says John Poisson, theservice's founder. "They can have an immediacy that is compelling."
Given the underlying appetite for concision, he notes: "A photo can be worth a thousand words."
