Twitter @ 7

Twitter celebrates its seventh birthday today

Although  I like to Blog with my Dear Darling Wife and do Facebook sometimes, I have never really seen the point of Twitter or needed it. Is telling the whole world and his wife what we are doing every few seconds or minutes in 140 characters or less necessary or a good use of our time?  In my opinion celebrities etc use Twitter for cheap publicity as with Facebook; no expensive PR or agent needed!

I guess many celebs hire paid ‘professional’  Twitterers to summarise the minutiae of their existence each minute!

Would you call inane or stupid twitterers twats or twits 😉 LOL

Twitter can be useful for spreading news, debate albeit in a shallow manner.
A skill of summarising a topic issue is a useful skill to develop; text or txt speak is employed to minimise the characters used to keep to the 140 limit!

200 million users worldwide, now send an average of 400 million short messages – or tweets – every day.
If Twitter did stop, another mode of fast commnication would take  its place

On Wednesday, Budget day, Britain’s main money manager Chancellor George Osborne joined the micro-blogging service and posted his first message on its website.
As this report from the BBC says.

However, it isn’t everybody’s cup of tea.

Private Eye editor Ian Hislop has compared middle aged men on Twitter to “fathers dancing at a wedding”.  And BBC Radio 4’s Today programme presenter John Humphrys once used the show’s Twitter feed to advise users to “stop counting letters. Get a life instead”.

The service, originally called “stat.us” and then “twittr”, was launched in 2006 by Jack Dorsey.

He says he was inspired by signing up to blogging service Live Journal in 2000 and spent the next six years refining his idea for “a more ‘live’ LiveJournal. Real-time, up-to-date, from the road”.

Now people use Twitter to campaign, share and discuss news, fundraise, propose marriage, challenge authority – and try to catch the eye of teen heart-throb Justin Bieber, who at time of writing has more than 36 million followers.

Twit facts

• Each message posted on Twitter can be up to 140 characters long, including web addresses, user names and hashtags

• There are 200 million active Twitter users worldwide

• Every day 400 million tweets are sent every day

• It took three years, two months and one day for the first billion tweets to be sent

• There are 10 million users in the UK, and 80% of them access Twitter via their mobile phones

• Of Twitter’s global users, 60% check the service on their phones

• Some 40% of Twitter users choose not to write any tweets themselves, but use the platform to follow news and interests