Are You Twittering?
July 10th, 2008 | Posted by Pauline
Twitter - it’s the latest social networking thing! (Okay, it was the latest thing last year, but I just found out about it.) Twitter is a new type of social networking site based on micro-blogging. Sign up, set up your profile, find your “friends”, and do short 140 character maximum posts. It is strangely captivating.
Twitter was founded by Evan Williams who created Blogger (now owned by Google) and Biz Stone (also worked on Blogger and has written two good books about blogging). Their company is Obvious Corp.
So, follow me on Twitter! You will find some other Slow Travelers there: danamac, divinacucina, dreamofitaly.
And there are Twitter knockoffs. Evan Prodromou, founder of wikitravel.org (now owned by Internet Brands, as is my old site SlowTrav.com), has a new company, Control Yourself, which has launched an alternative to Twitter - identi.ca. Note the .ca domain name - he is an American, currently living in Montreal, and used the .ca domain name.
Identi.ca is based on open-source software, as is wikitravel, meaning you can create your own microblog on your website. I don’t quite get why you would want to do this, when you can form specific communities within Twitter, but then back in 2000 I was sure Amazon would never be a success. Read more on TechCrunch - The Problem With Identi.ca Is That It Is Not Twitter.
It does make me a bit embarassed that Evan sold to IB, then started a huge Web 2.0 venture, while I am sitting here writing about England, configuring Wordpress plugins for my blogs and baking bread.
