Technology Review on Twitter: is it here to stay?
Tim Finin, 1:00pm 8 April 2007Technology review has an article on Twitter asking Is Twitter Here to Stay? with the dek “A new online messaging tool is hot, but it may be too banal to last”. The article starts by comparing Twitter to Jott, “a useful tool for capturing thoughts that occur to you when you’re away from your computer and unable to write them down.” While I’ve not tried Jott, the two systems don’t seem to have much in common except using mobile phones.
I did lear from this article that the first Twitter prototype was done in Ruby on Rails in two weeks.
Stone says the company completed a working version of the software in only two weeks using Ruby on Rails, a programming language and a set of prefabricated software modules widely employed by developers of the new raft of Web services known as Web 2.0. The hard part, he says, was “navigating the business aspects of the mobile industry. It took us months to get a short code and figure out how to play nice with all the major U.S. and international mobile carriers.”
I also thought this was a good illustration of one role that Twitter fills:
Dedicated Twitter users defend the service, suggesting that the daily minutiae actually add up to something significant. “Asking ‘who really cares about that kind of mindless trivia about your day?’ misses the whole point of presence,” writes Liz Lawley, director of the Lab for Social Computing at Rochester Institute of Technology. “It’s about letting the people in your distributed network of family and friends have some sense of where you are and what you’re doing. When I travel, the first thing I ask the kids on the phone when I call home is, ‘What are you doing?’ Not because I really care that much about the show on TV, or the homework they’re working on, but because I care about the rhythms and activities of their days.”
Related posts:
Ebiquity Blog