What exactly is Twitter? And what does its exploding popularity say about the state of the tech industry? Inside the hottest Web startup since ... gosh, February at least.

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I ask Dorsey, a 31-year-old NYU dropout whose slender build and mop of hair evoke the pre-psychedelic Beatles, when Twitter will start making money, known around these parts as "monetization." "We'll monetize when the time is right," he says, as the backfire of a motorcycle on the street below roars through the room's open windows. "We raised enough money [$22 million] to get to that point through experimentation."

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Twitter, in case you're over 25 and don't live in a trendy coastal metropolis, is a "micro-blogging" site. It's a free service that lets you send the briefest of messages to everyone in your network. It marries the mass appeal of blogging with the rat-a-tat-tat of text messaging.

To use Twitter, first go to the site and sign up for a handle - mine, for example, is adamlashinsky - and then start typing in the entry field. Maximum message size: 140 characters. Twitter refers to these missives as "updates"; its users prefer the term "tweets." Users "follow" one another and, if they choose, receive a notification when new messages arrive. Twitterers do their thing at Twitter.com as well as by cell phone and on sites like Facebook.

And what do Twitterers twitter about? Anything at all really, from the quotidian ("I'm hungry"; "going to bed"; etc.) to the substantial ("wildfires are spreading"; "Hillary just conceded"). Like a lot of Web 2.0 applications, the best way to understand it is to just try it out.

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Other establishment types are getting down with Twitter. Barack Obama's campaign (handle: BarackObama) has 51,620 followers and counting, who've requested updates on events. CNN distributes news alerts via Twitter

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Twitter's CEO won't go into any detail on how it will evolve from hip technology to moneymaker. "A lot of people have ideas about how to monetize this," says Dorsey. "And so do we."

 

http://money.cnn.com/2008/08/06/technology/true_meaning_of_twitter_lashinsky.fortune/index.htm

 

http://twitter.com/prefixmag

I still don't quite get why Twitter is so big, but this article has a good explanation.

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The answer lies in understanding Audience.
Twitter has a simple premise: You tweet & the message is pushed to your friends. The actual mechanics are slightly different (messages go to everyone who follows you, whether they’re your “friends” or not, assuming your stream is public) — but from a user’s perspective, the circle of receivers consists only of the people they know. Everyone else is part of a faceless crowd that’s hidden behind the follower count.

This simple premise holds the key to Twitter’s success: messages go to a well-defined audience. In the moment you release a tweet, you know who’s on the line and you have an idea of who can catch a glimpse of your message. @replies are the best illustration for this sense of audience: Even though Twitter is not a point-to-point message delivery system (let alone a reliable one), @replies are sent with the understanding that they will be read by the intended people because they are known to be in the audience. (Imagine a newspaper article that suddenly greeted a specific reader.)

Blogging on the other hand has no such clearly defined audience.

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http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/10/why-twitter-hasnt-failed-the-power-of-audience/

I'm sort of amazed when people start following my twitter. i guess if I lived in St. Louis still, a twitter about seeing shows in NYC and getting promo copies of CDs I wanted to hear would be pretty awesome. And that's basically what I write about.

What's your twitter ID JD?

 

Looks like there's a limit of 2,000 for Twitter.

 Twitter forbade him from following any more users after he hit 2,000. Twitter made the rule to fight spam. Here's how spam works on Twitter: A SEO specialist — sorry, "social media marketer" — creates a Twitter account and then begins following as many people as possible.

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a user has enough followers of their own, Twitter will allow them to follow more than just a mere 2,000.

http://valleywag.com/5036026/no-you-cant-follow-2001-people-on-twitter