Twitters growth is explosive. The new micro blogging phenomenon grew almost 12,000 percent last year and has become a serious competitor for Facebook and MySpace.
Some say its novelty - others say it will soon replace Google.
Mainstream celebrities embrace it and 10 million others do too
Celebrities like Stephen Fry, authors like Neil Gamon and Downing Street Twitter, it seems everybody's starting to twitter.
Twitter is a micro-blogging service that allows people to send out very short messages to other people.
The guys behind it were actually the people behind Blogger, which was sold to Google for an awful lot of money a few years ago
Now Twitter is even giving Google a run for its money.
“Google is now too slow and too old. By the time it gets to Google it’s already happened and if you really want to know what’s happening right now - Twitter is the place to go,” says internet marketing guru – Kaila Colbin.
When a gunman shoots down his old classmates in Germany - Mumbai is bombed - or a pilot lands his plane in the Hudson River - Twitter breaks the story first.
It’s the instantaneous way to let others know what's happening around you.
“Its a super simple easy to use quick to set up form of communication and it enables people to stay in touch when they're on the road through their handsets and their mobile devices, so in some ways your taking your network your community your whanau with you on the road," says ‘Internet expert extraordinaire’ - Helen Baxter.
All you do is follow other like-minded people who in turn can follow you - you get their updates and they get yours.
“Think of Twitter a bit like a CB radio, so when Damon uses his CB to say ‘traffic looks bad on main south road boys’ it’s a personal but public broadcast that other truckies can respond to ‘cheers for that’ but Damon doesn't know just who else is listening”
“Twitter works the same way - I put out a message I might send it to you but I have to know that anyone who chooses to tune in at that moment could also hear what I have to say so it’s a much more public forum and a much more promotional forum”
Cheflyn Baxter tweets about three times an hour, so he's a bit of an addict.
“I'll find an interesting article on the internet and I’ll use a service called Tiny Url to shorten it into a small piece of text and use the rest of my tweet to explain in as few words as possible what the rest of the article was about in a way that I hope will interest my friends and readers,” says Cheflyn.
People use the service in different ways.
When a drunk stranger broke into one twitterers’ house - he didn't ring the police - he logged onto Twitter and set up a live video stream.
Now there's a guy who is currently called the ‘twitchhiker’ who is trying to hitchhike his way from the UK to NZ purely through lifts and staying on peoples sofas that are offered to him through Twitter.
And tomorrow when NASA tweets that one of their astronauts is about to do a space-walk, its 21,000 followers can tune in live.
But why do people bother?
“Its put me in touch with a lot of people that I met face to face that live all around the country who are in similar lines of work to me who work from home and we don’t have an office to collect together,” Cheflyn says.
In that way, Twitter is like a virtual water-cooler, a constant stream of people that you're listening to - watching the conversations flow past like a little river.
But each drop in that river is like a personal message - so when you receive a tweet from Britney Spears or Stephen Fry - it really feels like they're talking to you.
“Twitter is a great way to keep in touch because every message that gets sent out has a very personal feel to it and any individual who sees that message can reply to it personally so it’s a really powerful tool for busy people,” says Kaila.
Kaila coaches businesses on how Twitter can work for them.
“You can have someone sitting at the game sending in texts from their cell phone that will update your Twitter account”.
For the founder of a new men’s basketball franchise - using Twitter means she will jump through fewer hoops to build the brand.
“When people come to your Twitter account and they see the Christchurch Cougars following all these other basketball teams it positions you in the global basketball community”
For some twitter is their only form of advertising.
“One of the things I think is really important about Twitter and Facebook and all of these social networking services is that they are effectively tools to serve us as people.”
“And because they're not for everyone - and so if someone’s not inclined towards growing a network or being extraverted or inclined to communicate with large numbers of people than it may be that Twitter is not the service for that person”
But Twitters real value is as a search engine.
“When you have that many people contributing information - the data that you can search to get relevant and timely information is just massive”
And you don't have to have a Twitter account to search it. With the answers Twitter provides, it has established itself as a powerful tool.
“I think Twitter is defiantly at the forefront of a revolution even though the name sounds frivolous it is actually a lot more important than people realise right now”
And remember – it wasn’t so long ago that Google was just a peculiar word too.