Maybe that's going a little far, but a lot of people are certainly talking about Twitter, the so called "micro blogging" service that fires super short and super simple messages to groups of contacts based around the premise of: "what are you doing right now?"
That's the spirit of the Internet, really, capturing the essence of what's new and what's hot and what's going on this very second, and Twitter has found a way to capture some buzz, at the least, by harnessing that wave. I've just returned to the country after a month of mostly being offline (on a quest to find hobbits, as legend has it), and Twitter Fever has emerged as the big story during my absence.
Pete Cashmore at Mashable pulls out the "cat blogging" card in a snort-worthy piece entitled "The Evolution of Blogging, Cat Version." (Cat blogging is a derogatory term for navel-gazing bloggers who write about what they had for breakfast, how they felt after cleaning the dishes, and yes, what Fluffy McWhiskers has been up to of late.) Pete breaks down the issue perfectly by depicting two camps: those who see a "new blogging paradigm - short, to-the-point messages that let your friends, family and the world know exactly where you are and what you’re doing, every second of the day" and those who scratch their heads (or navels) and ask, "what's the point?" It's pretty easy to see where Pete stands on this one.
Mathew Ingram is by measures kinder in writing that the name Twitter "…is perfect, since it conveys precisely the kind of instantaneous, frivolous, and maybe even scatter-brained nature of the app itself, like a bird twittering." He admits, however, that it is "… a pretty cool way of sending out short thoughts."
Article comments
1 - Janice
Welcome back from your sojourn abroad. Now I'll be up-to-speed on current goings on in the internet world!