Collegiate Times

Twitter is only a couple years old, but we're seeing its residual effects trickle down the media front at an exponential rate.

This growing social networking service has even seeped into the frontal lobes of pop culture.

The growth is noticeable - Twitter began experiencing problems related to its rising number of users in 2007. The service has experienced outages resulting from traffic overloads because of its increased popularity.

But I suppose that's a good thing.

In a nutshell, Twitter is a social network and micro-blogging service founded by Cornell students Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone and Evan Williams.

The service enables its users to send and read other users' updates known as "tweets." Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length.

Updates are displayed on the user's profile page and delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them, referred to as "followers." Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends to their discretion.

Micro-blogging allows users to send brief text updates or micro-media (photos, audio) and publish them, either to be viewed by anyone or by a restricted group, which can be chosen by the user. According to the official Twitter Web site, Twitter's function is to exchange "quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?"

Basically, Twitter is an innovative, less-gated form of communication. It allows you to share information with those you wouldn't normally exchange email or IM messages with, thus escalating your contacts to a community of like-minded people. Whether you see it as a remedy to Facebook or AIM is up to you.

One makes an account, creating a personalized homepage. Much like Facebook, it will ask what you're doing, and your input is compiled into a "Tweet" thread with other Twitter members - while every entry gets its own webpage.

The true essence of Twitter is being able to browse conversations (hopefully intellectual ones) and browse an individual's micro-blogs. You can even send information to your AIM or your Blackberry. I find one would find this fascinating or completely useless.

I first caught onto the Twitter buzz when President Obama spoke of economic calamity and war during his informal address to the joint session of Congress.

As lawmakers watched him with the dignity Americans have come to expect of their leaders, they whipped out their phones and began sending text messages like they were in McBryde 100.

However, Twitter is all about immediate reactions, and that's exactly what we got from a few legislators who got a little carried away with partisan rhetoric.

Everybody's doing it.

Even YouTube has succumbed to Twitter mania - below every video, if you click on the "Share" link, you will find three options: MySpace, Facebook, and now Twitter.

 You can expand the box for even more sharing options, but those are the main three, and Twitter was just recently added.

Social applications of Twitter can seem limitless, but it can be especially utilized for business use - it can be used to broadcast your company's latest news and blog posts, interact with your customers, or to enable easy, internal collaboration and group communication in real time.

FedEx, Comcast and Jet Blue have already introduced Twitter into their organizations' procedures.

Even police are now using Twitter to keep the public up-to-date on everything from road closures to AMBER alerts.

Twitter circumvents conventional media outlets and creates a portal where police can pass on urgent information to the public in a safe, efficient manner.

In a personal sense, Twitter is a constant pulse product, meaning it can really sap your attention span. That seems antithetical to life-hacking, or at least to limit procrastination. Twitter may be a great way to keep in touch with your friends and quickly broadcast information about where you are and what you're up to.

Nevertheless, I am a strong opponent to becoming so engulfed in virtual relationships that you lose a sense of reality. Twitter offers a degree of instantaneous information that assimilates consequences and contingencies similar with other social networking websites.

It is up to us to maintain virtual composure.  

With great power comes great responsibility.

Perhaps if Peter Parker used Twitter. Uncle Ben would still be with us.