1. Do you think Twitter’s 140-character limit for tweets is a barrier to effective communication? Why or why not?

2. For what kinds of messages would Twitter be an appropriate communication channel?

3. How could Twitter improve communication within an organization?

4. FURTHER RESEARCH Imagine you have been tasked with analyzing the “official” tweets of a competing company in order to discern their social media strategy. Choose a company with a Twitter presence and select fifty consecutive tweets to analyze. What is the company attempting to communicate with its tweets? Do they tend to be public or intended for individuals? What proportion of their tweets are retweets? Do they tweet Twitter-only deals or specials? Based on this analysis, how would you define this company’s social media strategy?

Whether or not you tweet, there’s no denying that Twitter’s having a profound eff ect on the way we communicate with each other and the outside world. Is the popular microblogging service reinventing communication or just abbreviating it? Do tweets contribute to the conversation or dumb it down? Let’s take a look in more than 140 characters.

Tweets, RTs, and DMs were conceived on a playground slide during a burritofueled brainstorming session by employees of podcasting company Odeo. Jack Dorsey (@jack), now Twitter’s chairman, suggested the idea of using short, SMS-like messages to connect with a small group. “[W]e came across the word twitter, and it was just perfect,” Dorsey says. “Th e defi - nition was ‘a short burst of inconsequential information’ and ‘chirps from birds’. And that’s exactly what the product was.”

Dorsey developed a working prototype, initially used internally by Odeo employees, and refi ned the concept before releasing the fi rst public version on July 15, 2006. Th ree months later, sensing the magnitude of Dorsey’s invention, Dorsey and other members of Odeo, including current product strategist Evan Williams (@ev) and creative director Biz Stone (@ biz), formed Obvious Corporation and neatly acquired Odeo and all of its assets, including Twitter.com, from Odeo’s shareholders and investors.

Who Uses It? Demographically speaking, there’s a better chance that your mom’s on Twitter than you. Unlike other social media tools, Twitter use skews unusually toward older users who might not have previously dipped their toes into social networking. According to industry analyst Jeremiah Owyang, “Adults are just catching up to what teens have been doing for years.” Web analysis site comScore points out that only 11% of Twitter’s users are between 12–17.

Like any popular social media tool, Twitter’s also become a vehicle for communicating (sometimes) carefully crafted messages of self-promotion, attracting the usual suspects like corporations (@starbucks), politicians (@BarackObama), social organizations (@amnesty), and musicians (@ladygaga). And don’t forget astronauts: @Astro_TJ sent the fi rst off -Earth tweet on January 22, 2010, from the International Space Station. By late November, ISS passengers sent an average of a dozen tweets each day from their communal account, @ NASA_Astronauts.

A Growing Chorus of Tweets In Twitter’s fi rst full year on the web, its relatively small user base sent around 400,000 tweets per quarter. After a buoyant reception by attendees of the 2007 SXSW Festival, during which the daily tweet average jumped from 20,000 to 60,000, the service leapfrogged to post 100 million tweets per quarter the next year.

At a recent count, Twitter boasted 175 million registered users sending 95 million tweets per day. Th is compares closely to the estimated one billion messages sent daily through Facebook Chat. Th e topics that rule water cooler chatter—sports, gossip, and politics—also drive tweet counts through the roof.

At times during Twitter’s dramatic initial spurts of growth, the company struggled to maintain uptime. Users have been quick to curse the Fail Whale, an image of a blissful cetacean being carried out of the ocean by birds that Twitter displays when service interruptions arise. “Too many tweets!” the image reads, and though the site has a recent uptime average of 99.7%, downtimes are particularly noticeable (but not tweetable) during tech industry gatherings like San Francisco’s Macworld. ………………