Twitter has really taken off in the last few weeks. If you haven’t signed up yet, and are sick of hearing about it, I sympathise. I didn’t understand what the point was at all until I signed up, originally just so that I could follow a few interesting people better than I could using RSS. Eventually, you’ll see a conversation going on and want to join in.
From a web architecture point of view, Twitter is particularly interesting because it is, to my memory, the first web 2.0-ey application that doesn’t really need a website. They’ve done such a great job with their API and backend that there are dozens of excellent applications and plugins for just about every publishing platform. I read and post from a bunch of applications — Tweetie on my iPhone, and Lounge and Tweetdeck on my laptop — and very rarely actually visit the Twitter website.
I guess this is a matter of partly good timing (now that smartphones are common), and partly that tweets are perfect iPhone-sized data.
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[...] has 140-character limits), and users who visit the twitter website, or use one of the myriad desktop and smartphone applications to keep up with tweets. These users are not concerned about the character limit in the same way. I [...]
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