Wall Street Journal: Friends Swap Twitters, and Frustration. Twitter is one of several growing services, including Google Inc.-owned Dodgeball, that tie together instant messaging, social networking and wireless communication. Twitter allows members to use their computers or cellphones to distribute short messages on what they’re doing. Each message is limited to 140 characters, but there are no limits on how many messages a user can send. Members specify whether they want to be alerted by a text message on their phones or an instant message on their PCs when friends post updates.
This story spends a lot of time worrying about the problem of message overload. I found it a problem, too, when I was signed up by an early user.
What about the journalistic potential of Twitter? It’s huge.
(I’m still baffled that Knight Ridder failed to use the domain headlines.com for stuff like this…)
on Mar 16th, 2007 at 2:29 pm
I’m experimenting with for that knoxnews.com here, but I was wondering if I was nuts 🙂
I definitely don’t have the Twitter thing figured out, but if people are going to use services like that, it makes sense to me to go to the party.
Who knows, maybe we’ll wake up with a hangover tomorrow, but for now, party on.
on Mar 19th, 2007 at 1:10 pm
No Jack, you’re not nuts…Dan, I heartily concur! See http://www.twittermap.com for a breakthrough way of looking at twitter updates. It overlays the updates onto a Google Map. Users can geocode their position at the time of update. I would love for someone to architect a Twitter News mashup to take advantage. Since Reuters now has a reporter embedded in 2nd Life, why not embedded reporters on Twitter as well?
I am trying to prototype something like this for the Chicago area. Contact me if interested msmithivas at gmail dot com
on Mar 19th, 2007 at 6:31 pm
Wow, that’s a nice Mashup. Thanks for sharing.