As time passed, I decided I had to try it out for professional reasons--you can't work in the internet industry and ignore new developments in the space. I opened an account and followed the short list of people I could find who were also on Twitter. And I waited for a while, dutifully tweeting about being hungry or tired or whatever, and feeling like I must have hit that point in your life where you just can't get into what the kids are doing these days.
Finally, I found my Twitter-muse. I started tweeting in haiku! One of the greatest hurdles initially was that I can't answer a yes-or-no question in fewer than 140 characters. But seventeen syllables usually come in under the limit. I now exchange tweets with people I've never met in person or even e-mailed. I follow breaking local news and pundits. I was hooked. But I still found few people outside of work who knew about the coolness.
Needless to say, that day has passed. Twitter has steadily grown in popularity as more people have learned of its existence. At this point, if you haven't at least heard of Twitter, if not tweeted yourself--well, you're certainly not getting wi-fi in your cave. Politicians tweet now. I hear about it in the mainstream many times a day.
Twitter is one of the more recent in a series of phenomena starting with the internet, passing through personal homepages, then blogs, then social networking websites. And judging from the steady climb in the graph, Twitter is not going anywhere soon. Gone are the days when the few of us who knew about it were constantly annoyed by the appearance of what was dubbed the "Fail Whale" when logging into the site. This is all the more impressive when you consider that the graph only shows web traffic. People tweet from their mobile phones. There's a whole wave of software like Yoono that lets you participate in the tweet frenzy without even leaving whatever web page you're already on. Can you say, "Critical Mass?"
Do you have a Twitter account? How long have you been tweeting? Whom do you follow? Let us know in the comments.
