Twitter

If blogs achieved a certain notoriety for their sometimes excessive examination of the writers’ personal lives, then the current trend to update one’s “status”—essentially, a brief rundown of what you’re doing—takes our culture’s obsession with hyper-connectedness to another level entirely. The idea behind Twitter is simple and breathtakingly absurd. The site is devoted to letting you update your friends with messages of no more than 140 characters. (That’s not much longer than the previous sentence.) Once you have a Twitter account, you can send messages from the Twitter site, your phone, or an instant-messaging service. Frequent Twitter users essentially broadcast updates about their lives throughout the day—a message saying “I’m running out of toothpaste” at 7:04 a.m., “train’s 20 minutes late” at 8:12 a.m., “the guy in the cube next to me needs a shower” at 9:14 a.m., and on and on. And believe it or not, this can actually be useful. Because Twitter members get their own web pages, the service can be used for “microblogging” (that is, to run a blog composed of brief, pithy posts sent from your cellphone). Or you can ask a question via your phone, and your Twitter friends can text you the answer. Or you can run a news or information service, essentially churning out very brief, very quick updates throughout the day. But in a Twitter-focused universe, we’ve just realized: We’ve said way, way too much.