Twitter on Ulitzer

Lately it seems like writing blogs is getting out of fashion, what with the rise of microblogging star Twitter.

Something about Twitter is intriguing. I guess the simplicity of writing your thoughts within 140 characters is a force larger that anyone expected. Reminds me of the early days of Google, a sparse screen of white space with ten words. The sheer excitement of entering any word and hitting the enter key and seeing pages of results was a trip, whether the result set was of any use or not.

My first reaction to Twitter was like that of many - who wants to know if you are about to take a shower? But I underestimated the power of human connections. Now I read that Oprah has 30,000 followers even if she has yet to write one tweet. Demi Moore has a ton of followers and recently she helped someone claiming to commit suicide, dissuading him via Twitters. Passengers of the plane that landed on the Hudson river communicated via Twitter to friends and relatives.

Fred Wilson (pictured below), an early investor  and a board member of Twitter, said, "All the people you've heard of and more are coming to Twitter saying, "We want to do something with you."

My problem is keeping up with all the tweets from the ones I am following. They flood with such force, it's hard to keep up. One has to continuously stare at the tweets, and that can be a distraction from real work one has to do. Now, I get tons of emails from titles like "internetmarketing", "dominopizza" as my followers. As I said before, easy of use is equal to ease of abuse. I already see that in Twitter.

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