All of a Twitter

I was a little uncomfortable when writing my piece on Twitter for the Wiki Man column at the beginning of this year. Mindful that some of the magazine’s offline readership are sometimes faintly sceptical about newfangled gadgetry (the telegram, the Newcomen engine, the loom…) I was cautious about writing a fairly upbeat piece about a new form of communication which lies dangerously close to the line which divides useful innovation from senseless absurdity. Many would say Twitter lies on the wrong side of that line.

A year or so before I had registered http://twitter.com/The_Spectator, but mostly for my own amusement. I thought it useful to have updates from Coffee House, and used Twitterfeed to convert the RSS feed from The Spectator’s site into automatic Tweets. Every now and then I would get a message informing me that Suchandsuch was now following The_Spectator on Twitter. The thing remained popular among self-indulgent new-media obsessives, me included, but I was not confident, all the less so with the advent of Facebook, that Twitter would prove to be any more than a fascinating anomaly in the history of online social media.