CLICKS: What the heck is Twitter?

(3/29/07) -- If you read a lot of blogs, you have probably heard of Twitter. In fact, it's hard to stay away from the buzz surrounding it. But what is it?

Russell Holliman, CEO of Podcast Ready, has been using Twitter for a while and answered some questions about the service. He says it is a lot like an instant message program that comes to your mobile phone as a text message.

1. What is Twitter?

Basically, you can go in, create an account and begin posting messages (140 characters max) to the public "stream" for the world to see. It can be done through the site, but it's most effective as SMS messages. As a user, you can then go in and pick friends. These friend's messages will then be the only ones that show up in your personal "stream" and you can even select which, if any, you want delivered to your phone via SMS. And of course there is an RSS feed for the public stream, your private stream, and the stream that contains just your messages... or micro-blog postings.

As you can image, there has been a ton of tools made by the community. http://www.Twittervision.com is very addictive. It uses Google maps to show the location of each and every public message as they come in.

Twitter was really, really cool and useful at SXSW. So many people on Twitter were there that it made keeping up with everyone and finding the best parties very easy. Now that we're all separated again, it's still fun but I don't know how terribly useful it is to have such micro-blog postings come to me in real time.

2. What do you use it for?

The nice thing is, I can tune into anyone's postings but they don't have to tune into mine if they don't want to. I also use it to make little comments here and there and make people aware that I exist. My personal blog has seen good growth since I got into Twitter…people checking my profile. And hopefully that will lead some over to Podcastready.com as well.

3. Does it live up to the hype?

Does anything? People's first reaction is, "I don't get it." Then either because they get addicted, or they are afraid of missing out they stick around. In the end I think it will help define a new type of social community and a new way of blogging. But I don't know if it's worth all the hype, especially right now. Dodgeball from Google has been around for a while, as has Groovr. I think they are better. But as you know that doesn't matter really. Twitter is getting the hype and so it will probably win

4. Anything else?

I can see Twitter-like things being really effective when associated with groups (like Groovr) or specific locations (like Groovr) but as a general system it's easy for one to filter out the jerks, but hard to filter out the noise. I really can't ever see Mr. and Mrs. America ever getting into it... but their kids... their kids are going to love it!

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(Copyright © 2007, KTRK-TV)

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