twitter

ither you think it's god gift to the mediaverse or you just don't get it, but the digerati is all alight about Twitter. The user-driven newswire, still in its mere infancy, has attracted everyone from Brittany Spears to your grandmother. Now that Oprah has signed on, and the apocalyptic unification of celebs and one-finger-wonders on a 24/7 tweet binge has passed, we have to ask is this the final nail in the coffin of net banality.

When it first arrived and backyard bloggers evolved into tweeter-stars, Twitter beget and sometimes answered the question, can you really tell us anything useful, nonetheless interesting, in 140 characters or less. One million users later we're still not entirely sure because, after all, who's making any money? After signing up for free and perusing Twitter's ad free pages, one immediately joins the guessing game of how Twitter spins a dime from their sky rocketing user ship. The Twitterverse's decentralized news desk capitalizes on the pure human desire to share information, thoughts and ideas. Basic literacy and an ethernet connection is all that's required, and thus it has turned out to be the ultimate telegraph for the masses. And like it's earlier forerunner, it's a game changer.

Now post-twittical mass with a retweet button at the bottom of every blog post, we are in the throes of an unprecedented viral media plague. And while retweets can give any website its 15 minutes, people are still unable to pin a definitive business model on it. Thus we return once again to the foundational question of what is this all good for.