By Jason He

Gargoyle staff reporter

Posted Monday, March 5, 2007, The OG, features

THERE'S SOMETHING ON the Internets that's got a lot of people atwitter lately — and that something is Twitter, a 1-year-old site that you could describe in a lot of ways.

You could say it's like a FedEx or UPS package tracking service for your life. Or you could call it a mini-blog. In my mind, it's somewhere between the two. In the site's own words, Twitter serves “a global community of friends and strangers answering one simple question: What are you doing?”

Sounds simple enough (and also boring enough; it might make you wonder why the site's developers even bothered to create it in the first place). Once you register for an account, you're probably going to start using it. And depending on how “eventful” your life is, you might use it again — and again, and again, and again ….

All of a sudden, everything that was previously only worthy of mentioning in a pithy AIM away message (and maybe not even that) now has a comfortable spot online.

Examples? Here are some actual updates I've dug up from my Twitter account archives. It's a very, very small sample of the 359 updates I've posted since I created my account on Dec. 30 (and they're probably out of chronological order, too).

• “calculus homework”
• “uploaded some new pics to Flickr”
• “mmmm … pizza :)”
• “Waiting for my piano teacher at the Smith Memorial Hall”
• “stopped by Gordon's for a while, now back at home”
• “it's almost Friday”
• “Dinner @ Za's”
• “webMathematica is freaking awesome”

In addition to posting updates via the Web, users can also update via text messages (which, for this kind of service, is probably an absolutely necessary feature). In the above list, I've highlighted the updates that I sent through my cell phone.

Overall, I think Twitter's awesome. Hats off to senior Robert Boyce, who linked to his Twitter page on his blog back in December — it's probably the only way I would've ever known about Twitter.

In a world where people are increasingly interested in documenting even the most mundane minutes of their lives (aka “liveblogging”), Twitter fits in perfectly. One would have to actually start using it, though, in order to see what it's really all about.

Twitter's got a long way to go before it catches up with MySpace or Facebook in terms of popularity, but the idea of today's Facebook users becoming tomorrow's Twitter users doesn't sound too unrealistic to me.

Besides, in the past three months, Twitter's traffic ranking on Alexa.com increased a whopping 18,823 over the past three months. Also according to Alexa, it's currently the 5,843rd most popular site on the Web.

Oh, and …

Twitter's no fun when your friends aren't using it. In addition to updating with what you're doing (or whatever the heck you feel like writing within 140 characters), the other part of the site (and the other part of the fun) is to see what your friends are doing. In fact, when you log in:

Well, how about you just create an account, add some friends (preferably people you actually know in real life) and see what you think?

Note: An earlier version of this article was posted on the Gargoyle staff blog.