How Twitter changed the world

Monday, April 5th, 2010

Never before have so many conversations been started by asking the innocent question of "What are you doing?"

I'm sure that most English teachers despise Twitter and the Internet for allowing us to slaughter all of the rules of our language. The common phrases we exchange suddenly fade away in favor of acronyms: ROFLMAO is so much easier to type than "Rolling On the Floor Laughing My Ass Off."

The 140 character limit of a tweet forces the messages to always be concise. It is common practice to identify re-tweets with "RT", but the boundaries of intellectual property rights are stretched on Twitter because there is little room to give credit to the originator of the content.

Twitter is also changing the way that information is rapidly propagated to the public. I heard about the earthquake yesterday from a California pool party ten minutes before CNN gave their first report.

Want access to my hand-picked celebrity Twitter feed? Here's a link:
CleverThings.com/clever/people/celebrity_tweets.jsp

Best regards,

-- Gary Wright II

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