Twitter hits the New York Times, the article about the practice of twittering starts with a picture of Jack Dorsey, and Biz Stone of Obvious, the 10-person start-up in San Francisco that created the Twitter messaging service. Regular users of the service are called twitterers.

It’s easy to satirize Twitter’s trendiness, and cranky critics have mocked the banality of most tweets and questioned whether we really need such an assault upon our powers of concentration. But right now, it’s one of the fastest-growing phenomena on the Internet.

Jason Pontin (interviewer NYT, ed. in chief / publ. MIT Technology Review): “My own experiences with Twitter were mixed. I quickly realized that decrying the banality of tweets missed their point. The only people in the world who might be interested in my twittering — my family, my close friends — were precisely the ones who would be entertained and comforted by their triviality.

But I also strongly disliked the radical self-revelation of Twitter. I wasn’t sure that it was good for my intimate circle to know so much about my daily rounds, or healthy for me to tell them. A little secretiveness is, perhaps, a necessary lubricant in our social relations. I wondered whether twittering could ever have broad appeal”.

Twitter hits the New York Times, the article about the practice of twittering starts with a picture of Jack Dorsey, and Biz Stone of Obvious, the 10-person start-up in San Francisco that created the Twitter messaging service. Regular users of the service are called twitterers.
It’s easy to satirize Twitter’s trendiness, and cranky critics [...]