Word: twitter
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...thing you can say for certain about Twitter is that it makes a terrible first impression. You hear about this new service that lets you send 140-character updates to your "followers," and you think, Why does the world need this, exactly? It's not as if we were all sitting around four years ago scratching our heads and saying, "If only there were a technology that would allow me to send a message to my 50 friends, alerting them in real time about my choice of breakfast cereal...
...skeptical at first. I had met Evan Williams, Twitter's co-creator, a couple of times in the dotcom '90s when he was launching Blogger.com. Back then, what people worried about was the threat that blogging posed to our attention span, with telegraphic, two-paragraph blog posts replacing long-format articles and books. With Twitter, Williams was launching a communications platform that limited you to a couple of sentences at most. What was next? Software that let you send a single punctuation mark to describe your mood? (See the top 10 ways Twitter will change American business...
...millions of devotees have discovered, Twitter turns out to have unsuspected depth. In part this is because hearing about what your friends had for breakfast is actually more interesting than it sounds. The technology writer Clive Thompson calls this "ambient awareness": by following these quick, abbreviated status reports from members of your extended social network, you get a strangely satisfying glimpse of their daily routines. We don't think it at all moronic to start a phone call with a friend by asking how her day is going. Twitter gives you the same information without your even having...
...range of websites and message boards in an apparent attempt to restrict any discussion of the issue. Web monitors report that some 6,000 chat rooms and message boards in China have been blocked by censors known collectively as the "Great Firewall." In addition, social-networking services like Twitter, the photo-sharing site Flickr and even Microsoft's new would-be Google-rival search engine, Bing, have all been blocked - a first for China. (Read a TIME story from 1989 on Tiananmen...
...updates about someone’s life through pictures, posts, and video does not require physical proximity. Perhaps even more important than boosting our ability to multitask, the information revolution has bred a generation of remarkably good stalkers. In the extreme, this can become voyeuristic. An unrelenting barrage of Twitter updates threatens excessive intrusion for both readers and writers, challenging our most basic understanding of the concept of “privacy.” But for the most part, our online interactions are a natural response to a new and generational exhibitionism; after all, Facebook albums and Tweets...