Educators, parents, technology developers, information science researchers, and almost anyone with one foot in a social networking space are mildly curious about how interconnected digital information pipelines work–me too. That’s why I attended a recent workshop about one of them–Twitter–offered by Kaila Bussert from the Cornell University Library. I discovered, as many other users have before me, that a twittle knowledge can be a dangerous thing.

“Too many tweets! Please wait a moment and try again” is the message that Twitter users may see on their screens along with this whimsical “Fail Whale” image created by Sydney artist and designer Yiying Lu when the Twitter system cannot keep up with microbloggers.

Twitter began as one of those small technical phenomena that seemed to have limited use for serious endeavors and was reported to have grown to include over 1.3M unique monthly visitors (April 2008) from every corner of private and public life. That number grew to 3M monthly users by June of 2008. The simple question that underpins the entire Twitter universe is, “What are you doing?” The 140-character response to that question fired people’s imaginations while creating yet another digital communication pipeline to get the word out about YOU.

Since Twitter launched in 2006 businesses, news organizations, universities, schools and now even members of Congress and the NSF have found ways to use Twitter microblogs to communicate about a wide range of topics. It has been described as a personal news wire that provides regular people who serendipitously find themselves in the midst of a news event with the ability to text their observations to Twitter. Stories abound about how major news outlets now scan Twitter feeds to find out where news is breaking.

The Pew/Internet and American Life Project reports, “11% of online American adults said they used a service like Twitter or another service that allowed them to share updates about themselves or to see the updates of others.” The bread and butter of this service remains people’s fascination with their ability to broadcast ambient facts about their day-to-day lives. Seemingly mundane reports about drinking coffee and carpooling often result in reports of news and information that turn out to be of interest to almost everyone depending on who you are, where you are, and what you do everyday. Last week, for example, even some Oscar night glitterati decided to bypass mainstream entertainment reporters in favor of sending their own direct tweets from after parties.

It seems to some analysts that these tiny bursts of information may be the closest thing we have seen to real time group conversation. The most direct way to discover for yourself how Twitter “feels” is to go to http://twitter.com/,register, and explain what you are doing.You will begin to get a few requests to follow your tweets over the next few days.

There are hundreds of Twitter-related tools and resources on the web. Here are a few that may help you begin your twek. And really, that’ s the last “tw” word invention I will make you read. The others belong to someone else. 

twitterholic (don’t your thumbs hurt yet?) At this web site you can tweet your twitter page stats that are carefully hoovered up by twittastic robots a few times a day.

twhirl Send and receive tweets from your desktop.

Twitbin Send and receive tweets using this Firefox add-on.

Tiny URL Shorten long URLs to reduce the number of characters in your tweets.

Twitzer Use this Firefox add-on to shorten your tweets.

Lahinsky, Adam. “The True Meaning of Twitter.” Fortune. 158.3 (2008): 39.

Follow me at http://twitter.com/mintonmorris.