All Annotations of From Many Tweets, One Loud Voice on the Internet - New York Times[Preview]

saved byeyal matsliah on 2007-05-03

• Twitter, which was created by a 10-person start-up in San Francisco called Obvious, is a heady mixture of messaging; social networking of the sort associated with Web sites like MySpace; the terse, jittery personal revelations of “microblogging” found on services like Jaiku; and something called “presence,” shorthand for the idea that people should enjoy an “always on” virtual omnipresence.
• Although Obvious has become secretive about how many people use Twitter, Evan Williams, the founder of Obvious, told me that there were three and a half times more tweets in the second week of April than there were before South by Southwest.
• Instead, Mr. Williams says, Twitter is best understood as a highly flexible messaging system that swiftly routes messages, composed on a variety of devices, to the people who have elected to receive them in the medium the recipients prefer. It is a technology that encourages a new mode of communication, he contends.