A brief attempt at describing Twitter

By Todd Stadler · Wednesday, October 31, 2007 4:26pm

I mentioned Twitter in my last post, but, well, have you heard of it? It's a ... uh, hmm, this is where I always stumble.

It's a service (?) which you can interface with via the Web or your instant message client. And, perhaps most importantly, via text messages. In theory, all Twitter updates (Twitterings? Tweets? Twitter missives?) answer the question "What are you doing?"

But since they're designed to fit in a standard text message, these updates are 140 characters or less. Which is why people refer to Twitter as a platform for "microblogging".

Personally, I look forward to the day of nanoblogging — 10 characters or less — in which people merely post emoticons to express their current state:

Stadler: :-)

JotaCo: =/

Stadler: :'( --<-{@

JotaCo: [8^0)

Stadler: (:3=

Okay, I just Googled "microblogging" to make sure I'm not making it up — people really use that word to refer to Twitter. Over 600,000 hits — I'm safe.

However, I also Googled "nanoblogging", and found a bunch of people (almost 16,000) talking about Twitter. No no no! That's all wrong, people! I came up with the idea of true "nanoblogging" — right here in this post! Fine, I'll call it "picoblogging".

What the ... 83 people think Twitter is picoblogging?! Okay, then allow me to coin the phrase "femtoblogging", but that's it! (I will ignore those two results in Spanish.)

Boy, if there's anything funnier than emoticons and technologically trendy services, it's SI prefix humor.