Although he originally had his doubts, blogger Jeff Jarvis now considers Twitter as “an important evolutionary step in the rise of blogging.” Twitter is an online web portal that allows users to send and receive text messages, called “tweets,” about any topic they want.

For Jarvis, the appeal of Twitter lies in the user's ability to control the size of the audience. In sending a tweet to the website, “only those people who care to follow me on the site” will receive it. Equally it's possible to route that same tweet to a Facebook page, in which case a wider circle will receive the update.

According to Jarvis, Twitter is important because it creates feeds from a range of sources: friends, major newspapers or individual reporters such as Ana Marie Cox, who has been using Twitter to cover the US primaries for Time.com

In the view of blogger Patrick Ruffini, “Traditional news operated on a 24-hour cycle. Blogs shortened this to minutes and hours. Twitters shortens it further to seconds.”

Additionally, Twiter is designed with an API programming interface that allows developers to create new services on top of the original design. Everyone from witnesses at major news events to commuters wanting to share traffic advice has found a way to use Twitter's adaptability to their advantage.

“All this springs from a deceptively simple idea and tool,” Jarvis writes. “Create a platform, make it open, and people will do things with it that you never could have imagined.”

Source: Guardian.co.uk