Tweet Tweet....

As you all might have heard, Twitter is the fastest growing internet application this spring. All of a sudden everybody is twittering about what they are doing. For those of you who haven't yet been swept up in the twitter stream, Twitter is basically a microblogging tool with a social networking function. Basically you follow different people, and they can choose to follow you, and then you twitter about what you are doing in 140 characters or less (kinda like the status update in facebook).

So, what do people twitter about? Well, some use it just to tell people about what's going on throughout the day. However most people use it to connect with people who share the same intrests as themselves. Through twitter they can share information about things they come across on the internet, or even update people about news as it happens. This was the case for an American student who was in Egypt to protest against their government. When he and his translator got arrested he managed to twitter the word "arrested" from his cell phone on the way to jail. This message reached everyone who followed him on twitter, and very quickly word started spreading through the bloggosphere and people were kept informed about how things were progressing. Like he said "The most important thing on my mind was to let someone know where we were so that there would be some record of it ... so we couldn't [disappear]," Buck said. "As long as someone knew where we were, I felt like they couldn't do their worst [to us] because someone, at some point, would be checking in on them."

Of course, not all twitter stories are as dramatic as this one. Ashton Kutcher, the American actor has been an eager twitterer for a while, and he actually just passed 1 000 000 followers today. For him, and a lot of the other celebreties twitter can be used instead of or in addition to press contacts, and whenever something new happens in their career they can release that information themselves. Other celebrities that are twittering at the moment include Britney Spears, Ellen Degeneres, Puff Daddy and apparently Oprah Winfrey will be twittering her first tweet live on her next show.

Closer to home, we can now actually follow or own prime mininster on twitter, and more politicians will probably start twittering the closer we get to the next election.

So, what do I twitter about? Well, if you post your twittername in TwitterSheep it will generate a wordcloud of the most used words amongst your group of twitterers. Here's my wordcloud....Look interesting?
...maybe I need more celebrities in my twitterstream to liven things up.

Anyways, a final warning. Twitter can quickly become quite addictive. Jennifer Aniston apparently just dumped her boyfriend because he spent to much time twittering. Below you can watch what happens as a young man struggles against the pressure to Twitter his life away:-)

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