What is Twitter?

Twitter has been around for a while now, but is starting to gain a bit of popularity/usage.

I was planning on writing an explanation myself but i found the below article on the BBC website.

Path.

With so much information to go around, it seems that our appetite is changing: we want our information to be instant, we want it frequent and we want to be easy to consume quickly before we move on to the next thing. It doesn’t even have to be particularly well-formed.From SMS news alerts to simple communications from friends burning off their free credits, especially in the UK, we’re accustomed to receiving nuggets of information via text message. Combine this principle with the RSS feeds introduced by blogging and you get Twitter, the current web service du jour to come bounding out of San Francisco. You can use Twitter to send 140-character text messages via the website, instant message or on your phone, to anyone who has chosen to “follow” you. They will then receive those messages via the medium(s) of their choice.

The implications of this idea are still being explored: depending on who you talk to, it could be really useful (in the right hands) or maybe even psychologically harmful (for the wrong minds).Either way, it’s already very popular, and probably indicative of things to come. Tumblr, the self-styled “scrapbook” publishing tool, is likely to have taken its minimalist inspiration from services like Twitter and del.icio.us, encouraging users to provide a constant feed of info-nuggets without editorialising them too much.

One benefit of stripped-down information in this way is how it can quickly become more useful in conjunction with other types of data. Twitter itself doesn’t do much in this respect, but lots of people are mashing it up – see who’s most “popular” on Twitterholic, for example, or see where in the world people are Twittering from at Twittervision.

Twitter itself perhaps took inspiration from the slightly less snappily-named Jaiku, which not only updates with communications from its users but sucks in feeds from other places – and automatically combines this with location and “availability” data. They’re calling this “presence”, and soon we’ll all know exactly what everyone we know is doing and where they’re doing it. 24-7.

This presents a quandary: should we find less interesting friends so that we don’t feel we’re missing out, or should we encourage our friends to be more interesting so that we have something better to read?