Passing Thoughts

“Follow me on Twitter.” For most of today’s generation especially those who are savvy about current popular social networking services, it’s easy to appreciate what this buzzy phrase is all about.

Twitter is the newest form of social networking and microblogging service that enables users to send and read other users’ brief or encapsulated messages and updates, called “tweets,” using computers or mobile devices with Internet access.

While it originally started mainly with text-based posts of up to 140 characters (20 characters less of mobile SMS messaging) shown on each user’s profile page, tweets have quickly evolved to now include shortened website resource locators that lead to message sources, mostly either blog or news sites.

By default, tweets are visible to anyone but privacy settings allow access modifications where senders can restrict message delivery only to their friends list. Those in the list who subscribe to the user’s tweets are called followers, and are doing the act of following on every user’s tweets.

Twitter started as an experiment in 2006 when Jack Dorsey, a 30 year-old American software architect from St. Louis, Missouri, thought of merging ‘away-message’ with the freedom and mobility of SMS messaging. An acclaimed outstanding innovator at such age, he would later be famously known as the creator of Twitter.

By tapping the vast resources of real-time information network via Internet technology, Twitter draws its popularity from millions of people all over the world, many of whom post tweets as often as every second to let their ‘followers’ know what’s happening.

Most of the tweets today come in the form of random thoughts, expressions of emotions, state of mind, opinion, reactions, conversations, and some even personal rants. A significant chunk of messages, however, are more purposive like breaking news, announcement of important events as well as clever posts that wittingly or unwittingly bear advertising and marketing undertones.

Overall, Twitter’s timely bits of information that quickly spread across a global mass of people, general public, online friends and associates, as well as nations and civilizations, can help make better choices and decisions while creating the platform to influence on what’s being tweeted about around the world.

From the ordinary individual to the most powerful person on earth (like US President Barack Obama, whose rise to Presidency was also partly propelled by the power of social networking services such as Facebook and Twitter that helped generate campaign funds and volunteer support), Twitter in more ways than one, makes the powerful connection.

In 2007, barely a year following its launch in the U.S., Twitter had only about 400,000 tweets posted per quarter. Then in 2008, it pole-vaulted to 100 million tweets posted each quarter. By the end of 2009, it reached an incredible record of total 8 billion tweets posted. This year, it is projected to double to 16 billion tweets.

Leading technology experts are one in citing that Twitter has experienced an explosion in global traffic over the past year, establishing itself as one of the most-visited social networking sites across the universe, including the Philippines which ranked as 6th top Twitter user according to a study released recently, which showed Twitter penetration highest in Indonesia, followed by Brazil, Venezuela, Netherlands, and Japan.

As of the latest ranking by Twittercounter.com that tracks statistics of top 10 million Twitter users across all continents, the following emerged as the world’s top 5 Twitter users based on the number of followers (as of September 30, 2010):

1) Multi-awarded singer Lady Gaga (@ladygaga) with 6.5 million followers;
2) Britney Spears (@britneyspears) with 6 million;
3) Hollywood hunk Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk) with 5.8 million;
4) US President Barack Obama (@BarackObama) with 5.54 million; and,
5) Teen sensation Justin Bieber (@justinbieber) with 5.50 million followers.

With about 1 in every 3 human beings connects to the Internet, and with 3 in every 4 global Internet users access social networking sites regularly, Twitter becomes one of the most ubiquitous activities across the web, as more users around the world have become acquainted with connecting and expressing themselves through this social media.

Indeed, Twitter is the evolution of mobile communication. While it is not about to replace SMS, Instant Messaging, or email, it nevertheless brought forth a new public dimension to the rapidly escalating global messaging.

Follow me @yomontenegro on Twitter.