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.)

7 Twitters Of The World

Twitter's clones are everywhere.

How Many Twitter Accounts Do You Have?

TechCrunch France editor Ouriel Ohayon like a growing number of people loves Twitter, but he is (well, I thought initially) fairly unique because has more than one Twitter account. Ouriel decided to run a small poll to see if others had more than one account. Although a small sample size, he was far from alone. According to his poll, the majority of Twitter users (53%) have more than one Twitter account. (Techcrunch)

Why obvious?

The compagny that launched twitter is called Obvious.

Why obvious? Different reasons...

"Great ideas tend to be obvious—later

We hope to make the type of things that make you say "Of course!" The Internet, Google, the wheel. These are all obvious things, but hard to imagine before they existed. When we started Blogger, we were working on a much more complicated product. We almost wrote Blogger off, because it was too simple, too trivial—too obvious. It wasn't obvious until much later what blogging would become."

Help Wanted: Office/Operations/Executive Assistant/Master of Miscellaneous Domains

Looking for someone.

You Can Graph Your Twitter Usage

On techcrunch

A new service provided by Brad Kallet of Pantsland fame allows you to track exactly how frequently you are using Twitter.

Twitter Stats offers a key range of (as the name suggests) Twitter statistics based on username. My stats below demonstrate the basics. The service is a little slow at this stage (up to 5 minutes to generate the stats) and the graphics are basic, but for Twitter users looking for some statistics it’s a helpful service.

Also there and there

Twitter business model

The question of business model timing seems to come up weekly with regards to some startup. As Twitter usage has grown, have they f'ed themselves out of a real, sustainable business model? And has Pownce done something right by launching with a business model? Personally I prefer that a startup come out of the gate with a business model -- perhaps it's the accountant in me. (Read next...)

Twitter: your friends give you good informations

Twitter is all about friends. Friends give you information on twitter. That's what this blogger is telluing us.

"Blog Friends and equivalents let me know what a person’s surfing, Facebook mini feeds show me what someone’s sharing, there are many social bookmarking tools and RSS readers available, there are even shared readers available.

But so far none of them gives me this kind of information as succinctly as Twitter. Now of course the value didn’t come directly from Twitter, it came from Halley. I know Halley. I know she reads a lot. And I trust her opinions, without having to agree with all of them. And when she says “Best thing I’ve read all week” I sit up and take notice. I take a look. I wander over to where she points."

Will it fly? How to Evaluate a New Product Idea

Evan Williams says everithing about the subject. Great!

Twitter founder Evan Williams exclusive interview