Twitter is like the sticker in office memo board or the notes passed between classmates among classes at school telling friends that where you need to go and what you are going to do. In some ways it’s also like blog especially the way how it publishes but it’s not as long as a blog article. In the first couple days, I was confused about what “twitter” was. I took it as a similar form of MSN signature because sometimes I typed some messages in MSN to tell my feelings and what I was doing in a few words. I was not talking to anyone but just want my friends in my list to see those notes and know about me. Twitter can do the same thing. Whatever I typed in it, all the friends in my list or those not in my list could read and got some information. They not only could read but also reply to my messages so that I could communicate with them like using IM. Twitter brings the content to public so that other people can get the content of your conversation too. I would say it’s somewhat like the chat room or BBS. The cool thing is twitter can be fastened with some IM software like AIM and Gtalk or cell phone. If you have any of those IMs in your computer, you can send the messages thru those IMs. Messages would be posted in Twitter web page directly. If you fasten your cell phone to twitter, messages can be sent to the web page as SMS. Another neat thing is you can display Twitter on your web pages like facebook.com, myspace.com or other kind of social network websites. Visitors to your blog or profile page on the web can know what you’re up to at the moment.

Twitter is also an online service for you to “follow” your friends. After you get the permission of following, you can read what he or she posted in a page. There’s no need to search your friends or explore a lot of pages to read the messages your friend writes. Whenever he or she publishes anything new or to anyone else, you might know at the same time like using RSS so it’s a good way to spread information.

Twitter is quite useful to some organized groups. If you follow your friend and they follow someone else, then you can communicate quickly with them too. Things in twitter can be public or private. If you set it as private, then your friends need your permission to read the message you write. If it’s public, everyone who knows your ID can read what you publish.

But from all those different ways to publish messages, the problem of twitter is obvious which is overflow of the messages. If someone doesn’t set the conversation to one-to-one conversation, when he or she in your network posts a message, it will display in webpage, IM and cell phone of everyone in the network. So if two of them have a long conversation about plan of this weekend, pages of the people in this network might refresh every few seconds for receiving those information which has nothing to do with them. Cell phone might buzz every few seconds too. It’s annoying especially when people just saying things that don’t make any sense.

On the other hand, twitter has similar function with facebook, myspace and other web pages about networking. It doesn’t have many new features attractive to the users. If it wants to have more users, I think it needs to develop more special functions.