happy birthday, twitter!

Today is Twitter's fifth birthday.  My, how that website has grown in the past few years.  To commemorate, we're flashing back to a post that I wrote nearly four years ago about the latest craze in social media and the rise of microblogging.

So, I’m apparently way behind the times.  After all, in today’s fast paced society, two weeks can seem more like two years in terms of the latest news.  Twitter, a site launched fairly recently, has become all the rage.  Concise blogs are in.  Users employ their cell phones to answer the all-important question: What are you doing right now? Posts are simple and can be broadcast to a variety of friends.  

Very Recent Examples:

• danceyrpantsoff grateful for friends like gramps. less than 10 seconds ago from web
• thewbert Forecasting Space Weather less than 5 seconds ago from web
• IamMimi back from lunch adnr eady to go less than 10 seconds ago from web
• hippy 30分経過：不眠症おそるべし。 less than 20 seconds ago from web
• stark Viendo el video tomado por un estudiante de VT de los tiroteos con su selular que pasan por CNN. Ese es el nuevo periodismo. less than 20 seconds ago from web
• marsepu about to go mail off my taxes. I HATE YOU IRS ……. please dont audit me. half a minute ago from im

As you can see, twitters are global, can range from sentimental to quirky to newsworthy, and are incredibly fast-paced. 

My biggest rant: Using Twitter (or even texting in general) causes people to completely abandon the use of proper grammar.  I don’t expect people to write a dissertation, just take a second to proofread.  Take IamMimi’s post, for example.  Couldn’t he/she identify the mistakes?  Did he/she simply not care?

Making this phenomenon even more interesting is the fact that 2008 Presidential Candidate John Edwards frequently uses Twitter to post about his campaign.  One recent twitter: “In san antonio.”  Much easier and more concise than a press release, don’t you think?

See the tweet by stark up there?  Now, I'm not fluent in Spanish or anything, but I'm fairly certain that that is about the Virginia Tech tragedy.  I don't think I realized it at the time that I wrote the original post, which was first published on April 16, 2007.  Also, marsepu was a day late on his taxes.  I wonder what came of that?

How has tweeting changed your web activity in the last few years?  Do you use twitter at all?  I have an account, but it comes and goes in spurts.  My husband, on the other hand, just opened his in October and uses it daily.  I never thought I'd see that.