A short high-pitched sound or whistle

Prior to 2006 the word ‘tweet’ had a very distinct and universal meaning and was about as topical as ‘Yawn’. In a few years what was once used to teach young children animal sounds has exploded into a social networking and micro-blogging service sensation.

If you’ve never turned on a computer before let me explain. Twitter is a web application that attempts to answer the question. “What are you doing?” Basically, it’s the away message feature of Instant message clients all by itself. Each entry has become known by the websphere as a 'tweet'

Twitter is synonymous with Facebook, MySpace and YouTube to name a few. Together they are single handedly (the irony of that expression isn’t lost on me) reengineering the way we communicate with each other, particularly the younger generation.

It is this reason I suspect in the aging geek equivalent of a mid live crisis I’ve joint the party and signed up on twitter. I have a handful of friends already on the service and the twitter site itself is quite polished, extracting possible twitter candidates to follow from my Google email account seamlessly.

It’s amazing how much of a PR tool it has become with companies and celebrities hoping on board to flog their wares under the guises of doing everyone a favor. The scary thing is this fresh medium works as we haven’t been over exposed to its loop holes. Not ever 48 hours old on twitter and I’ve already subscribed to Samsung, Xbox and Essendon FC marketing is some form or another.

Despite all this I’m going to stick with it for the time being, having run this blog for over six weeks now. The time necessary to output a 140 odd character message versus crafting a four to five paragraph blog entry is considerably appealing. I think the two services complement each other and with a little nerd gadgetry I hope to integrate one with the other ...