The Twitter Top 140 - Page 3

23. TwitPic

20. TweetDeck

19. TwitterFox

17. Lack of formatting — No more horrible design. The font choice for everyone's text is mine. All mine!

13. ÜberTwitter

12. Twhirl — Oh, I'm sorry that I left your favorite Twitter application off this list. I'm sure it's really great.

11. TweetStats — Hoo, boy, I sure do say "jeopardy" a lot.

10. The 140 character limit — Old guard newsies should love that people are now writing to fit on their mobile devices, a constraint of the old "ink and paper" method of communication.

9. It's faster than breaking news — Alerts and pictures of US Air flight 1549 showed up before the news outlets were able to grasp them.

8. It's free — Then again, on the Internet, most things are.

7. Shortened URLs

6. Voice-to-talk integration — Now I can safely tweet while driving. FINALLY.

5. Twitter Search — When an event is happening right now, it's ridiculously easy to cull information (if you're incredibly lazy and/or hate human internation)

4. Fitting complete thoughts into one tweet without abbreviations

3. Lack of ads

2. The way it can reinvent field reporting (and, um, live blogging)

1. What the future holds — This kind of communication will probably stay, because mobile technology just won't be able to handle long chunks of text. (Exception: Stephen A. Smith.) While Twitter still seems very raw, it's nevertheless captured the interest of technophiles and casual e-mail users alike.

Although maybe the future of Twitter should be closer to 140, because everyone knows how these techno-cultural crazes turn out. They start making more money, become a little less hip, the common man begins to resent it, and they move onto the next trend.

Article Author: Matthew T. Sussman

Sussman is the founder and former editor of Blogcritics Sports. Twitter: @suss2hyphens

Visit Matthew T. Sussman's author page — Matthew T. Sussman's Blog