Twitter

Not so long ago, I found a service called Twitter. It's a website where you can log in and repeatedly update the question: What are you doing?

Now, that's a simple way to put it but that's the kernel of its function. People answer that question and look for some feedback or just enjoy announcing their status to the world. On the next level, it acts as a huge distributed chat room.

Once you log on, you can subscribe to other users updates and sort of build a list of friends(today friends turned into followers and notifications but the concept is still there). To get started you can notify all of your real friends via email that they can sign up and "follow" you or you can simply browse the public_timeline, a constant stream of everyone's updates, to find interesting people.

I would say this service is one step beyond a blog. A blog is encumbered with a lot more composition and editing. Simply answering, What are you doing? is so easy, people let down their guard a little more.

Now this kind of conversation has been going on inside IRC, IM networks, and chat rooms for a long time but Twitter brings a new touch to chat. You can submit updates via SMS from your phone, or you can use a client like Twitterific. Finally you can just use a web browser.

If you've got some extra time and are looking for a way to join and/or understand Web 2.0 and social networking sites, why not check out Twitter?