What's Twitter?

For parents who think they are relatively up to date on their kids' social networking and text-messaging habits, here's a one-question quiz: What is microblogging?

If you know that it is sending out short messages broadcast to a social network to keep friends and lots of other people up to date on a latest thought, action—any minutiae of your very existence—then you have probably heard of Twitter. And if you haven't, you should, because chances are your kids are finding their way to this additional public way to share their thoughts and whereabouts online.  

Twitter members can use the company's web site, their cell phones, or IM accounts to post and read messages. The catch is the messages can be no longer than 140 characters long. Most usually answer the Twitter question: What are you doing? The messages go out to the member's social network, but they also go out to a public timeline that posts online.

Reading the Twitter public timeline is like dreaming in non sequitur stream of consciousness. From the outside, it's hard to see the true value in any of it, but I'm sure that's a generational statement that reveals my age.

Lifehacker's Gina Trapani writes that in between the "hours of Twitter candy" she connected with a friend in New York City who didn't know she was there, and got two useful work tips from her time spent on Twitter. She points us to the required reading below for Twitter newbies written by two Cnet writers with opposite views of Twitter. To learn more about this social-networking phenom, check out these links below. Then let me know what you think about it.

LINKS: In defense of Twitter [Cnet]
The case against Twitter [Cnet]
Is Twitter Here to Stay? [Technology Review]
From Many Tweets, One Loud Voice on the Internet [NYT]