The website Twitter is beginning to gain serious traction, it’s almost got a constant presence now on every technology blog out there, so it would be disrespectful not to mention it here too.
To sum it up briefly, Twitter is like the status message from your IM client logged and stored on the web for anyone to see. Alternatively, you could think of it as one sentence blogging. You make 140 character updates saying what you’re up to right now, from either the web-client, your mobile phone or an application connected to their API. Your friends can then subscribe to your updates and the website keeps a history of all the ones you’ve made.
Remarkably, this has really taken off, although I’ve not quite worked out why yet. It’s from the same person that started Blogger and Odeo, which I’m sure has a lot to do with it. If I was to create a service like this (and let’s be honest, it would probably only take a couple of afternoons) it would go nowhere, because I don’t have the people watching what I’m going to do like he does. But beyond that, it seems to have something that the techno-bloggers really love, simplicity. It doesn’t do much, but what it does, it does very well. The same reason they love Apple. There’s a worry therefore that it’ll ultimately collapse under the weight of it’s own features once everybody keeps pushing them in every direction.
What this isn’t, is a mainstream success. And I don’t see that changing any time soon. Your man in the street hasn’t heard of this, and I think you’d find it hard to describe to them why they might want to use it. So while it’ll continue to grow in popularity, and the geek love will continue, I don’t think we’ll see this even getting to myspace level.
Of course what I’d like to do is create something that gets to email level.
