Twitter

Twitter used to be called Twttr, at least, I thought it was. It's hard to find evidence of this.

It's the latest new thing, and as with many latest new things, I find it through Dave. Dave somehow manages to figure out the pulse of new things. He told me about Flickr before Flickr was big (and arguably, it's not that big).

What is Twitter? If you have some IM buddies that are younger than a certain age, they often list their away message letting you know where they are at any particular place and time. Modern youth do not seem that concerned about privacy, perhaps an outgrowth of reality TV shows like Big Brother, where people actually want to be filmed 24 hours a day.

Indeed, the latest online example of this is justin.tv where former Kiko employee, Justin Kan, straps a small camera on a cap, and films whatever he sees all day long. When he sleeps, he aims he camera at his bed, and using night vision, you can see him sleep, which is modestly dull.

The lesson one learns from having a camera is that no matter how boring someone's life is, someone is always watching. Two things have pushed Justin.tv to the next level beyond the cam sites that were popular a decade ago (JenniCam, being the most famous person) are the quality of video, which is much better than the old days when images refreshed once in twenty seconds, and even the best of them, Camarades, would stutter all the time, and that Justin takes the camera everywhere. In its day, the cams were mostly stationary, in the room of the cam star. When the star was not around, the room was empty. A viewer would get a terribly limited view of the person's world. Oh yes, there's also sound. Many cams of its day lacked sound.

Right now, due to its increased popularity, a hundred people might be watching at any one time, which means it's become increasingly difficult to see any video at all.

But I digress.

Twitter is much simpler. The idea is to have a website where you can update everyone by any means necessary. You can go to the website itself and put a note on what you are doing right then and there. You can send a text message from your phone. I think you can even IM to it.

And, while I haven't checked it out, you can keep up in similar ways. If I want to keep up with Dave's every move, I could probably route his updates to my phone. Now, he doesn't actually update enough to make that realistic, and he may indeed get tired of it very quickly.

But for now, Twitter seems to have caught the fancy of many people, especially at this thing called SXSW (which is short for "South by Southwest", a riff on a Hitchcock film) which I believe is hosted in Austin Texas each year.

Why would people want to update everyone on what they are up to? And why would people care? Yet, people have done this. Perhaps someone addicted to Twitter can enlighten me.

I'm just here noting it down, even as others have already noted it too.