Twitter away: A new social networking takes the chatter mobile

By PHIL KLOER, Cox News Service

Grayson Daughters is a-twitter. Also a Twitterer.

In society’s race to be faster than ever, the latest front-runner is a new technology called Twitter. A combination of text messaging and a social network (such as MySpace), it allows users to send out a steady stream of bulletins on what they’re doing via their phones, BlackBerrys, blogs and Web sites to a group of friends on all of their devices, and to the constantly updated Twitter.com .

“Last night I’m on my computer, and a Twitter pops up from my friend Shelby, who says he’s at the Vortex,” said Daughters, a video producer and blogger from Atlanta. “If I’d been out, it would have gone to my phone, and I might have stopped in and had a beer with him.”

Shelby Highsmith, meanwhile, says he’s still ambivalent about the new form of info-snacking, but he is enjoying playing with it.

“I’m a reluctant Twitterer,” said Highsmith, who’s working on his doctorate in mechanical engineering at Georgia Tech. “I definitely don’t use it as much as some people. I got one from a friend, and all it said was 'Sneezing!’

“I’m like, 'Great, why do I need to know that?’”

Fans of Twitter are generally keyed in on one simple concept: What are you doing?

Messages are limited to 140 characters, and the idea is just to keep people posted on what’s up.

In addition to the private postings, you can read the public messages on the Web site:

• “Would like to have an orange.”

• “It’s always fun when you go 25 blocks in 35 minutes. Yea, Phoenix traffic.”

• “Wasting a surprising amount of time, considering how much I have to do today.”

“It’s like an adult fun toy,” says Daughters, who tracks a network of 22 friends.

Already, the name is generating word play. Twitterhea, for instance, is the act of sending too many Twitters to one’s friends.

“The massive volume can be a problem,” Highsmith said. “A lot of people are just spouting off the latest thing that comes to mind.”

The application is run by Obvious Corp., a small company in San Francisco. Jack Dorsey, who created the technology seven months ago, said the company doesn’t disclose how many users it has, but said the number has been doubling every three weeks. The San Francisco Chronicle recently pegged the number at 60,000, but that could have doubled by now.

The growth curve caught Twitter off guard, and it has struggled to keep its systems running fast enough to please users; a frequent complaint is the slowness of the service.

“At the moment our main concern is our unbridled growth,” said Dorsey,

He said the company is adding hardware, even though it’s not yet generating any revenue.

“We have revenue models in mind,” Dorsey said. “But we want to get to a stable position first and take a breath.”

Politics has already taken to Twitter. Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards is a user, and Highsmith signed up as a member of Young Democrats of Atlanta to see whether it could be used for quick communications among activists.

Or you can see the more mundane public postings of thousands: Watching “American Idol.” Eating lunch. Stuck in traffic. Twittering away.