Twitter: Is Brevity The Next Big Thing?

April 9, 2007 issue - Jack Dorsey has long been obsessed with status. [I'M WRITING THE LEAD TO MY COLUMN] Not in the snob-appeal sense, but status as in "where are you and what are you doing." He became fascinated with the idea while programming software for cab and courier companies. And later he became entranced with the instant message "status line," which evolved from "I'm away from my computer" to dense, haiku-ish briefs of what people were up to.

So it was natural, when he was working for the San Francisco dotcom company called Obvious, to propose a service that tells your friends—via mobile phone, instant message, or the Web—what you're doing at any given moment. Obvious's founder, Evan Williams [I'M CHECKING GOOGLE FOR THE SPELLING] best known for starting one of the first blog software companies (later purchased by Google), gave him the go-ahead and last year Twitter was born.

The lure of Twitter—as well as its Achilles heel—is its simplicity. You "twitter" (yes, it's a verb) by answering the question "What are you doing?" in 140 characters or less. (How much information can actually be conveyed in 140 characters? As a yardstick, consider that this parenthesis contains exactly that number of letters and symbols.) These dispatches, sent as often as you like, are immediately blasted out to fellow Twitterers who have chosen to "follow" you, i.e., see everything you twitter by phone, IM or Web. One doesn't respond to a twitter, a big advantage over more intrusive forms of communication like instant messaging.

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