Twitter : Java Glossary

In his novel Capitol, Orson Scott Card describes a civilisation with a cult of celebrity. To prolong the lives of celebrities, they are put into suspended animation only to wake for one day in a century. During that day, every waking moment is holographically recorded. Twitter gives the illusion that you are such a celebrity and the world is desperate to know precisely what you ate for breakfast and how your bowels are functioning.

My nephew, Torrance Coombs, is a movie actor. He is on Twitter. His adoring fans swoon over his one-sentence insider updates and race to share them with others.

Sarah Palin uses Twitter to spread her stoned thoughts and urban rumors with astounding effectiveness.

There are so many people on Twitter, you will find dozens of people sharing a name with others. The only way you can tell them apart is a with a photo. So, unless you have a unique name, you need to upload a photo so your friends can find you. Twitter does not let you view the profiles of others before you sign up to follow them — receive their twits. You can decide to make all your twits public, or to restrict them just to people that you OK.

Twitter in increasingly used to broadcast free advertising, the equivalent of spam on other sites. This will probably destroy it. Every ’person’ who has contacted me on Twitter was a spammer.

Oddly, Twitter has become an international political tool for rapidly sharing information. The reason may be that Twitter is accessible from cell-phones, enabling people reporting events to get commentary out to the world without censorship.

Twitter is probably the simplest website ever. It is a triumph of the KISS principle. It does not even let you upload photos, the way Facebook does. However, most people use a third party application (e.g. TwitPic) to post pictures to Twitter accounts from cell-phones or lap-tops.

You can also monitor public twits from the entire planet by subject. Unfortunately, the HTML they ask you to embed is full of syntax errors.