New York Times about Twitter

New York Times published an intersting feature about twitter. Extracts:

"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."

"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."

Twitter is flexible. A lot of possibilities.

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.”

(Picture: Jack Dorsey, left, and Biz Stone of Obvious, the 10-person start-up in San Francisco that created the Twitter messaging service. Regular users of the service are called twitterers.)