I haven't used Twitter in a while, but I've been getting more and more emails about following my account on it.

 The Loose Wire blog has a fascinating example of "crowdsourced" journalism in action: When the UK experienced its largest earthquake in decades, the story was covered first not by the BBC or a traditional wire service, but by a twitter-only news service called BreakingNewsOn. And that service, run by a 20-year old Dutch student named Michael van Poppel, got its leads directly from Twitter users in the UK who were surprised by the quake and made Twitter posts about it. I think this highlights some important trends in the future of journalism. First, when news happens, there are almost some people around to observe it first-hand. So if enough of those people have ways of sharing their observations with the world -- via Twitter, blogs, Flickr, YouTube, or some other mechanism not yet developed -- then news reporting may consist largely of tracking down these various first-hand reports and synthesizing them into a story. It may not be necessary to send out a flesh-and-blood reporter to cover a story if there's already a ton of information about it on the Web.

 

Second...

http://techdirt.com/articles/20080227/010921368.shtml 

i disagree. it's like a glorified aim away message for people who have add. 

and it's not secure http://blog.twitter.com/2008/02/timeline-oddity-update.html

 http://s3.jeremybanks.ca/crazytwitter.mov

i thought it'd be cool and tried getting friends to join and they all didn't get it.

this was last year though. this year  it seems to be blowing up  

 I've been getting more and more people following me of late. I still don't entirely get it though. It basically just seems like the status update on Facebook.

 http://twitter.com/daba

Has Twitter Finally Gone Mainstream? Or Are We Getting Spammed?

 

You like us! You really like us! We've added 13 new followers to our SAI Twitter account in the last day, which is a bit curious since we don't use it all that much.

So what gives? Is this all a coincidental result of Twitter hitting the mainstream? Or is there something a little more nefarious going on? If you've got an idea, let us know in comments. We’re still waiting to hear back from Twitter.

 

UPDATE: Commenter Mike Gunderloy:

Twitter's email notification system was down from Friday evening until Sunday night. Then they caught up the queued mails all at once. So those followers are really spread across three days, not just a single-day bump.

  http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/4/has_twitter_finally_mainstream_or_are_we_just_that_popular_