Splicetoday

Pop Culture
Sep 23, 2008, 05:57AM

Brevity is the soul of new communication technologies

Looks like we're still on a nostalgic kick from yesterday. Twitter might not be as catastrophically addictive as YouTube, but it has plenty of potential.

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mrbill

Samuel Morse tapped out this historic message upon inventing the telegraph: What hath God wrought?

22 characters long.

Alexander Graham Bell's first spoken words on a telephone: Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you.

41 characters.

Neil Armstrong upon walking onto the moon: That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.

58 characters.

Some of man's greatest breakthroughs have been announced in a handful of words, so perhaps the new form of "micro-blogging" called twitter, which limits all messages to 140 characters, is onto something.

Launched a few years ago, twitter got a lot of attention during the recent political conventions with delegates, journalists and bloggers twittering away on their cell phones and laptops from the floor.

The premise of twitter is that you're supposed to write about what you're doing "at that moment," which produced such posts as "Just saw Sean Penn smoking outside the Brown Palace Hotel in Denver. He said he's in town for the convention."

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