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The influence of Twitter

Twitter... 140 character long messages and immensly popular. But how come it's so popular, which influences did it have on the internet and society of today?

Let your users post short messages of maximum 140 characters and let them follow each other. The idea is incredibly simple yet Twitter managed to get millions of people doing this. But why do we do this? Why are we so interested in other people's lives and why do we want to share what we do and think with the whole world?

I'm sure there will be some evolutionary theory behind it, but since I'm not a psychiatrist or something like that, I can only speak for myself. There are three reasons why I'm a Tweeter.

1. Learning: I follow quite a lot webdevelopers, PHP news accounts, webtrends-accounts, ... When something new or interesting pops up, I'm one of the first to know, to read about it and to keep in touch with the subject. I'm constantly learning and discovering new things.
2. News: Twitter is known for the speed news is spreading across the network. If something important or even less important is happening in the world, it'll be on Twitter before it's on the regular newssites. On a personal note, I even follow Twitter-account of newssites which also have an RSS-feed. Then why follow them twice? Because of the speed. My Twitter-timeline is always open (with a browserplugin or an application), but my feedreader isn't. I quickly get all newsflashes and in one or two sentences I know what's going on.
3. Networking: As said before: I follow quite a lot webdevelopers and I also get followed by other webdevelopers. News about this subject and conferences in the near future are announced and quickly spread across the network. Ask a question when you have a problem or a remark and you'll quickly get answers from people in the same business.

I do realize these are mostly reasons to read tweets, but why do I post messages? Well, same reason other people blog: because I want to say something, because I thought of something, because something happened, ...  Blogposts are mostly somewhat longer than one or two sentences, but not every subject is worth a complete post and that's where Twitter comes in.

Ofcourse Twitter alse has it's downsides. An item that came up in the news today was the case of Stephen Fry, the British actor-comedian-writer. Someone told Fry his tweets were boring, making him feel a bit miserable. A little bit of criticism isn't that bad, but it show what Twitter can do. There are many examples where the service is used to inform people about (extreme?) political views, to organise protests against the government or to spread gossip.

Not only Twitter grew quickly, but some companies also created services to help Tweeters post their messages. There's an application for every platform you can think of, there are services which lets you easily post pictures, videos and links, ... Even search engines start indexing tweets and thanks to the API everyone is able to create their own killer-app or -service.

It's clear Twitter has had an immensive impact on the social networking and the use of internet, but whether you want to use it is completely up to you. And once you have an account and if you liked this post, you can always start following me at http://twitter.com/JelleLampaert. Or did you really think I would write all of this without some shameless self promotion ;-)