All of a Twitter

It’s all the Bibliolatrist’s fault.

I’ve watched the growth of this Twittering (or is it Tweeting) phenomenon for the last couple of months. Today I noticed another of the Bloggers I visit had joined and being an adventurous sort (with too much time on his hands) I did the same.

I got an email back saying “Using Twitter is going to change the way you think about staying in touch with friends and family. Did you know you can send and receive Twitter updates via mobile texting, instant message, or the web? To do that, you'll want to visit your settings page (and you'll want to invite some friends).”

That seemed sensible so off I went to invite friends. Spent ages going from door to door only to find no one wanted to play out today, despite the sunshine. Eventually Twitter came back to me with “Twitter is over capacity. Too many Tweets.” How twee is that and where is the ‘sorry’ for wasting my time?

Twitter, which was founded in March 2006 by three Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, does not sell advertising and has brought in almost no revenue – although it hopes to charge businesses who use the service. Despite this, it has raised £13million from venture capitalists and rejected a £350million buy-out offer from social networking site Facebook a few months ago.

The New York Times called Twitter "one of the fastest-growing phenomena on the Internet." TIME Magazine said "Twitter is on its way to becoming the next killer app."

I’m not sure what a 'killer app' is but I think it just died.