What are you doing?
It's a simple question with a limitless set of possible answers, often mundane but somehow always new. Those four words, and their answer - in 140 characters or less - are the sole idea behind Twitter, a social-networking utility that, depending on your age and relative level of geekhood, is either the next big thing or something you should have known about, like, months ago.
At one point on a recent Wednesday afternoon, according to Twitter, a bass player who calls himself Redshifter was in San Francisco lamenting the theft of his motorcycle (the cops eventually found it) and wondering how to get to his gigs in Seattle and Portland. At the same time, a pastor in Oklahoma was wishing the Pennsylvania primary was over already, and the Associated Press had just issued a story about links between big bellies and dementia.
Here in Philadelphia, Alex Hillman was headed to a meeting (it would not end well) and Annie Heckenberger was in her office on South Broad Street, rejoicing in equal measure over the Janis Joplin playing on the office sound system and the handful of Rolos she'd copped for an afternoon snack.
"At first I didn't get it, I didn't understand that it was like micro-blogging, or micro-broadcasting," said Heckenberger, 34, who works for PR agency Red Tettemer helping clients use social media as a marketing tool. "So I was like, 'Why . . . is this person in Indiana telling me that they're getting ready to make chili?' "
Twitter is free, takes about 30 seconds to join and requires very little personal information. Imagine it as the point of a river at which many streams of consciousness meet, creating an endless flow of real-time conversation.
It's the same principle as text-messaging, but users only receive communiques, or Tweets, from other users whose streams they choose to follow. You can receive updates just on your web-based Twitter page, or on your cell phone, or through a user-created application like Twitterific, which lets Mac users send updates right from their computer's desktop.
If it sounds banal, some of it is - and that's partly the point, said Biz Stone, one of a trio of Bay Area techies who created Twitter back in 2006. But in the short time since then, Twitter's value as a "global communications utility" - its companies' stated goal - has already been established. During the last round of wildfires in San Diego, Twitter became a means for people to touch base, relay "I'm OK" messages or update the fire's spread, he said.
Or last week, you could have followed Free Tibet updates as the Olympic torch made its way through San Francisco.
Over in England, an official stream called DowningStreet keeps the public apprised of the comings and goings of Prime Minister Gordon Brown. So far, the White House doesn't have one, but several government agencies and members of Congress do. There are streams issuing traffic alerts for cities from Bangalore to Tucson; the I-495 Beltway around Washington, D.C., has one of its very own.
Neither Philadelphia's current mayor nor its tech-geek former mayor are Twittering, but a crawl through the 45 pages of users who list Philadelphia as their location will turn up journalists, bloggers, college students, entrepreneurs, weather updates (at WXPHILLY) and some of the city's hipper bars and restaurants.
The presidential race is alive and Tweeting as well: All three of the major candidates have active accounts, though with 22,000 followers, Barack Obama's official stream easily outpaces both Hillary Clinton (2,185) and John McCain (a paltry 295). Obama's popularity in the medium is such that at one point on Super Tuesday evening, his name appeared in a full 80 percent of all election-related Tweets.
The first constructive use of Twitter that Heckenberger found was during last summer's BlogPhiladelphia gathering, which she helped organize in her then-job with the Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Company. Very quickly, Twitter emerged as the easiest way to get in touch with all of the conference attendees, whether by informing them of scheduling changes or where to meet for drinks after the day's sessions. Even with so many folks toting around Blackberries and laptops, Heckenberger said, having them create Twitter accounts and receive updates that way eliminated the inevitable back-and-forth, inbox-jamming juggernaut that can result from mass e-mail.
To its creators, it is in exactly that kind of straightforward, point-to-point communication that Twitter shines.
"It sounds kind of boring and plain but I think what we're building is . . . kind of a next evolution, because it connects all of these other utilities that people are already using. It's connecting SMS and e-mail and blogging," Stone said.
The company won't say how many subscribers it has, but counts members in the United States and 10 other countries, with Japan alone accounting for 39 percent of overseas Tweets. Unlike social-networking platforms like MySpace, where the goal seems to be to compile the biggest number of "friends"- even if you've never met most of them - Stone said the average Twitter user has a group of about 10 people they follow and roughly the same number of followers.
Hillman, 24, a founder of Old City's Independents Hall shared workspace, is also a co-creator of Twitterholic, an application that ranks Twitter users by number of followers and updates, a kind of leaderboard of Twits. For himself, Hillman counts more than 1,000 followers but follows only about a third of that, because, he says, "That is all organic. It's not me going out and friend-whoring." Meaning, he tries to have some actual connection to or knowledge of the people he follows, rather than just adding folks at will.
As with any new technological toy, the frivolous uses are the most fun.
Twitter offers a way to get those passing thoughts out of your head and into the world at large within seconds. Wondering why you're down in the subway concourse and haven't yet seen that added police presence? Gloating over your favorite soccer team's latest goal? Itching to know from which planet the TV character Alf hailed? Tweet, and you shall find.
If blogging is a committed relationship, Twitter is the proverbial quickie - fast, but no less satisfying.
"Now that I'm addicted to Twitter, blogs to me seem like such the long way around," Heckenberger said. "I feel like I have to sit down and write a New Yorker article, and Twitter's become that proverbial People magazine for me."