Twitter and the Real-Time Web: On the real-time Web, information is created and consumed instantly, often through blogs and social networks such as Twitter and Facebook. The phenomenon exploded last year, as the surging use of URL-shortening services indicates; Web addresses must be shrunk in order for links to fit inside 140-character tweets. Twitter attracted new users and expanded its reach, but it still carries a lot of babble. Twitter has experienced exponential user growth in three years. But the rate slowed at the end of 2009. Credit: Tommy McCall From Technology Review:
Twitter plans to become the leader in instant news--and make itself into a sustainable business in the process.
At the microblogging company Twitter's San Francisco headquarters, in the sixth-floor conference room, founder Evan Williams was declining to tell me anything about the company's strategies to earn revenues when, suddenly, his cofounder Biz Stone blurted, "Whoa!" It was 10:10 a.m. on January 7, and it would prove to be the latest Twitter Moment, showing how far the service has moved beyond its early status as an amplifier of personal minutiae and confession. A minor earthquake had just struck: a magnitude 4.1 temblor centered 45 miles to the southeast. Throughout the Bay Area, thousands of Twitter users seized their smart phones or PCs to peck out 140-character-or-less tweets--updates in the form of text messages, Web-based instant messages, or posts on Twitter's website. Quake-related tidbits coursed through the company's servers at the rate of 296 per minute, according to tracking done by the U.S. Geological Survey.
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