your-guide-to-micro-blogging-and-twitter

“ONLY connect,” the English novelist E. M. Forster admonished mankind. I don’t think, however, that he meant that we should connect exclusively, or continuously.

Habitual users of a new, free communications service called Twitter would disagree. For anyone unfamiliar with the latest trends in technology, “Twitterers” send and receive short messages, called “tweets,” on Twitter’s Web site, with instant messaging software, or with mobile phones. Unlike most text messages, tweets — usually in answer to Twitter’s prompt, “What are you doing?” — are routed among networks of friends. Strangers, called “followers,” can also choose to receive the tweets of people they find interesting.

Tweets are published on a “public timeline” on Twitter’s home page. As I write this column, “54626” in Scottsdale, Ariz., is wondering, “Does anyone else really dig the word ‘Mandible’? I kind of love it right now.” “Opheliac9” in Minneapolis posts, “Guess what? I’m at the CC. Come one, come all.” “Angelamaria” in the Philippines is simply “annoyed.”

David Troy, a software developer in Maryland, has created a Web site called Twittervision that superimposes this public timeline on a Google map. Every few seconds, a tweet appears and vanishes somewhere on the globe. It is an absorbing spectacle: a global vision of the human race’s quotidian thoughts and activities, or at least of that portion of the species who twitter.

Most twitterers communicate with small networks of people they know, but the most popular have thousands of friends and followers. One of the best-loved twitterers, Paul Terry Walhaus, a gray-haired blogger from Austin, Tex., has 9,177 friends and 1,851 followers, according to the tracking site Twitterholic.

At least one politician has tuned into the service. John Edwards, who has 2,001 followers and 2,082 friends, recently twittered that his presidential campaign would be “carbon neutral.”

After Robert Scoble, who writes a popular technology blog called Scobleizer and who himself has 2,985 followers and 3,045 friends, challenged this ambitious vow on Twitter, Mr. Edwards twittered back that he would, as president, offset his campaign’s carbon emissions by financing alternative energy research.

Twitter, which was created by a 10-person start-up in San Francisco called Obvious, is a heady mixture of messaging; social networking of the sort associated with Web sites like MySpace; the terse, jittery personal revelations of “microblogging” found on services like Jaiku; and something called “presence,” shorthand for the idea that people should enjoy an “always on” virtual omnipresence.

It’s easy to satirize Twitter’s trendiness, and cranky critics have mocked the banality of most tweets and questioned whether we really need such an assault upon our powers of concentration. But right now, it’s one of the fastest-growing phenomena on the Internet.

In March, when Twitter was voted “best of the Web” at South by Southwest, the annual multimedia and music festival in Austin, the service had 100,000 members, according to Biz Stone, an engineer at Obvious. The festival prize prompted, or coincided with, a remarkably rapid adoption of Twitter by the international digerati. Although Obvious has become secretive about how many people use Twitter, Evan Williams, the founder of Obvious, told me that there were three and a half times more tweets in the second week of April than there were before South by Southwest.

Celebrity twitterers, Twittervision and the triviality of tweets have dominated early discussions of Twitter on blogs and Web sites. But Mr. Williams argues that critics do not appreciate the true utility of his service.

“It’s understandable that you would look at someone’s twitter that you don’t know and wonder why it would be interesting,” he says. “And celebrity twitterers are really outliers, even though they get a lot of attention.”

Instead, Mr. Williams says, Twitter is best understood as a highly flexible messaging system that swiftly routes messages, composed on a variety of devices, to the people who have elected to receive them in the medium the recipients prefer. It is a technology that encourages a new mode of communication, he contends.

“It adds a layer of information and connection to people’s lives that wasn’t there before,” Mr. Williams says. “It has the potential to be a really substantial part of how people keep in touch with each other.”

MANY twitterers agree. Mr. Scoble, the blogger, wrote to me by e-mail: “Twitter lets me hear from a lot of people in a very short period of time.”

Tony Stubblebine, who founded a social network called CrowdVine, wrote to me: “At some point I got so busy and self-absorbed that I stopped reading or writing personal e-mails. I’d see my sister about once a month and ask, ‘What’s up?’ only to find out, ‘Not much.’ Now I have a much more detailed picture of her life.”

But others who have tried the service are less enamored of the new connectedness. Bruce Sterling, the science fiction writer and journalist, who used Twitter at South by Southwest, wrote to me, “Using Twitter for literate communication is about as likely as firing up a CB radio and hearing some guy recite ‘The Iliad.’ ”

My own experiences with Twitter were mixed. I quickly realized that decrying the banality of tweets missed their point. The only people in the world who might be interested in my twittering — my family, my close friends — were precisely the ones who would be entertained and comforted by their triviality.

But I also strongly disliked the radical self-revelation of Twitter. I wasn’t sure that it was good for my intimate circle to know so much about my daily rounds, or healthy for me to tell them. A little secretiveness is, perhaps, a necessary lubricant in our social relations. I wondered whether twittering could ever have broad appeal.

Mr. Williams, who is 34, doesn’t seem to understand such reservations. “People seem to like it,” he says, adding that he wants to expand Twitter as quickly as possible. He candidly acknowledges that he doesn’t know how Twitter will earn money — although he speculates that direct marketing on the network has commercial potential.

“It’s sort of a classic Internet thing, trying to make something popular,” he says. “I’m not terribly worried about the business, because I’m confident we can extract value, and I’m funding all of it right now.”

He can afford to do so. Mr. Williams is a serial entrepreneur who made his fortune by selling Pyra Labs, the creator of Blogger, a popular blog publishing tool, to Google in 2003.

Sending tweets broadcasts “I am alive!” Reading tweets satisfies the craving of many people to know the smallest details of the lives of those they love. But whether those twin impulses are universal enough to make Twitter really popular — that is, whether Forster’s admonition has an absolute logic — and whether the service can be made into a sustainable business, are quite unknown. I’m skeptical.