IEEE Spectrum October, 2007 - Cover4

TECHNICALLY SPEAKING
By Paul McFedries

All A-Twitter

Ieee Spectrum | October 2007 | Na

The goal of all this twittering
seems to be to enhance one's
cyberspace presence, an elusive
concept that seems to refer to
being "out there" (wherever
"there" is) as much as possible.
Peel back the layers of a typical
Twitter user and you'll probably
find that he or she also maintains a regular blog, a Facebook
or MySpace account, a Second
Life avatar, and so on. The
dream is to achieve a sort of
virtual omnipresence. Such people are said to be ultraconnected,
although sometimes it's possible to be too connected. For
example, if someone twitters
that a particularly interesting
event is occurring at a nearby
location, the site can become
overwhelmed by the unruly
Twittermob that materializes.
Not that the entire world is in love with Twitter. Most people just don't see the point, and others dismiss it as a massive
time-suck. (Almost everyone who gets into Twitter calls it "addictive," which may explain why there are so many Twitterholics
out there.) For some people, however, Twitter bemusement has
turned into outright Twitter hate. The biggest complaint is the
unremitting triviality of most people's updates, particularly
dinner Twittering, posting updates about what you are making
or eating for dinner (or lunch or breakfast). One wag described
Twitter as "the 'Seinfeld' of the Internet-a Web site about
nothing." Other users complain about Twitter storms or Twitterrhea,
update deluges consisting of dozens of messages per day from
people who can't seem to stop themselves from posting.
Others deride Twitter and its ilk as hipster narcissism, a
charge they say is confirmed by Twitter users' insistence on
creating their own Twitter-based lingo. For example, a Twitter
update isn't a post, it's a tweet (and posting is called tweeting);
people who sign up with Twitter aren't called members or users
but twitterers or, inevitably, the twitterati; the nonfriends who
read a person's tweets are called followers (some of these folks
probably deserve a less euphemistic name: stalkers); and the
subset of cyberspace that consists of Twitter and its tweets,
twitterers, and followers is called the twitosphere. Hmm. They
might want to rethink that last one.
n
PaUl mCFeDrIeS is a technical and language writer with more than 40 books
to his credit. He also runs Word Spy, a Web site and mailing list that tracks
new words and phrases (http://www.wordspy.com).

www.spectrum.ieee.org

greg mably

The blog sea rch eng i ne
Technorati now tracks nearly
100 million blogs, with nearly
200 000 new ones added every
day. (As the Technorati tagline
has it: some of them have to
be good.) Folks from all walks
of life use blogs to opine to
the world, and it's a rare day
when some celebrity doesn't
start a celeblog. But the dirty
secret is the massive number of abandoned blogs. The
market research firm Gartner,
in Stamford, Conn., recently
put the number at more than
200 million. Clearly most people who start a blog soon give
it up for dead.
Why do so many blogs go
belly-up? Probably because
blogging is hard. Unless you
love to write, churning out
even remotely interesting mini-essays every day of the week
is a tough slog, particularly when you're not even sure anyone
outside of your immediate family is actually reading your musings. Perhaps this explains the recent explosion of interest in
microblogging, posting short thoughts and ideas to a personal
blog, particularly by using instant messaging software or a
mobile phone. Jaiku (http://jaiku.com) lets you create a miniblog
to which you post short messages-called jaikus-either via
its site or by texting the messages through your mobile phone.
Fotolog.com enables members to exchange short messages about
posted photos.
But the major buzz in microblogging centers around Twitter
(http://twitter.com) a site that combines social networking and
microblogging. It periodically asks members a simple question:
"What are you doing?" Members respond, or twitter-via e-mail,
instant messaging, short message service (SMS), third-party programs, or the Twitter site itself-with text-based posts no more
than 140 characters long. (When Twitter recently won an award,
its representative's acceptance speech was apropos: "We'd like
to thank you in 140 characters or less. And we just did!") This is
why services such as Twitter and the similar Dodgeball.com are
known as notification tools or quick-ping media.
What happens to all those posts? They get displayed on the
user's Twitter home page, of course-that's the microblogging
part-but they also get sent out to the user's circle of Twitter
friends. These friends can receive the updates via e-mail, IM,
SMS, or an RSS feed. Because of this, Twitter-like sites are also
known as constant-contact media.

http://www.jaiku.com http://www.Fotolog.com http://www.twitter.com http://www.Dodgeball.com http://www.wordspy.com http://www.spectrum.ieee.org

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum October, 2007