by Bar de Ness

Created on: December 16, 2010

This sentence you are reading has exactly 140 characters including spaces and without any correct pronunciation or grammar can be understood.

Did you count them? Congratulations. In reality Twitter will count them for you and cut you off in mid flow. Hence the need to speak in abbreviation. Think text messaging.Twitter limits your expressions to all and sundry with a maximum of 140 characters including spaces.

It's easy to join Twitter. Just click and create a moniker. Your voice will be broadcast around the world. The key is to get some listeners. And those listeners invariably want to be heard also. And that's easy too, because you are another potential listener. The joy of receiving an email saying you are being followed fills you with importance. How can you resist? It fuels human desire to be noticed.

The point is that 140 characters can say plenty if the chance was available, but Twitter, the social broadcasting conscience of half-wits, attention seekers, entrepreneurs, businesses, politicians and activists doesn't want that. What Twitter wants is links. Unique Resource Locator's (URL's) which lead elsewhere, and  likewise have a built-in instinct akin to homing pigeons returning to their loft. There isn't much room to say much after a URL link has been inserted even if it's been condensed. Twitter does that for you too so don't despair.  

As with any new web phenomena, great ideas get hijacked or undergo metamorphosis, and unless the potential for advertising is prominent, it will die a quick death. Twitter doesn't advertise blatantly, it doesn't need to. Its millions of users do that for them.

Hence the proliferation of every media to grasp it. A link on a Web page (this one for example) is a potential cent for someone. A link on a tweet can go viral and has the potential to garner global exposure. Tweeters (those who tweet) love to twitter, and adore spreading the word, regardless of the word or where it may lead.

Tweeters also like to wax lyrical about their daily mundane activity, whether it's a brand of  tea they are brewing or taking the dog for a walk. They will tweet at random and on the spur of the moment, wherever they are, be they watching the TV or outside in the street with their smartphones (and posting a snap to boot).  Celebrities like it because it keeps their profile prominent and panders to their needs of attention in a shallow and transparent world.  Businesses like it because they can generate a database and potentially sell their wares, and news media like it because they need to maintain their readers or viewers. Everyone who wishes to express an opinion has the opportunity to do so. But who is listening? The noise is deafening, yet it is a cacophony of a billion voices all trying to be heard.

"In the beginning was the word..." but the remarkable writers of the King James Bible could not have envisaged how that simple phrase would end.... "and the word was Twitter."

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