Twitter: You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll wonder why - all in 140 characters - The Boston Globe

Now all we need is a word that starts with “tw” and connotes ridiculous levels of over-hyping – check the full article for a snapshot of planet Twitter

Krums's "man on the scene" report was one of the highest-profile moments yet for Twitter, the two-year-old Web service that has become explosively popular among the Web 2.0 set. Users can fire off tiny messages from their computers and cellphones, from wherever they are, and have them appear on the screens of whoever is keeping track of them. The messages answer the question "What are you doing?" to an audience of friends, family, or random strangers, or to no one at all.

Twitter has already birthed an entire ecosystem of other sites that extend its power or interact with it. But Twitter isn't just a platform for technological innovation: It's showing signs as an engine of creativity for the language, too.

My bet: Twitter will follow Pointcast and become a verb for crashing after building incredible market awareness for something without a robust business model – as well as for increasing entropy by wasting users’ time and attention.

Twitter: You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll wonder why - all in 140 characters - The Boston Globe