Disclaimer: This is a real blog. Not a 140-character SMS that broadcasts your reply to the ultimate question that the rest of humanity is begging you to answer: “What are you doing at this moment?”In other words, I’m not twittering or powncing.

Twitter has received a lot of publicity, which helps me tread a little lightly on the details. The idea was hatched on March 13, 2006. Who’s behind it? Biz Stone, Jack Dorsey and Evan Williams (of Blogger fame). It was born in Oct 2006, quoting from Twitter blog:
Twitter was in part created because we thought the increasing amount of folks using the status message field in their IM client to indirectly communicate with friends indicated a potential need or market for a service built around that sort of use case.

Essentially, Twitter users send short messages of upto 140 characters that can be viewed either on a website or on mobile phones. You can either make it public (seen by all others who have a Twitter account) or to a select group of contacts that you choose. By April 2007, they had around 94k users, their popularity growing faster than the twiddling thumbs, leading naturally to some scaling hiccups. You can put the Twitter widget on your website so that your blog readers could know what you are upto each time you update it. You can integrate with your other IM identities from AIM, Gtalk, LiveJournal, Jabber, SMS Mobile Texting, and the Web Interface. Naturally, with a name like this, it has given rise to its own lexicon -Twettering, Twitterer, Twitterific, Twitterrhea, Twitterphobia and so on ….

Liz Lawley’s interesting post summarizes as: What Twitter does, in a simple and brilliant way, is to merge a number of interesting trends in social software usage personal blogging, lightweight presence indicators, and IM status messages into a fascinating blend of ephemerality and permanence, public and private.

The service is free and its business plan, as per current trend, does not exist. Serious believers think that “you build it; they will come and a business model will emerge” works for Twitter. Its star is in ascendency, among its users are personalities such Robert Scoble and even John Edwards. This area of ‘mini-blogging’ has too many wannabes - Dodgeball (acquired by Google), Jaiku, the Status line of Facebook, and Pownce (Kevin Rose’s new startup).

In the coming post, I will be digging deeper and will analyze the social impact of ‘mini personal status broadcasting systems’.

Further Reading:

Jeff Barr is quite enthusiastic about Twitter
Fred Wilson shares a VC perspective, calling Twitter “the Status Broadcasting System of the Internet”
Alex Iskold expounds forth on the Read/WriteWeb blog
A counterpoint from Scott of Jangro
SF Chronicle coverage