A bunch of twits

IT'S all geek to me. Luminaries as diverse as Stephen Fry, Barack Obama, Jonathan Ross, Andy Murray and Gordon Brown apparently can't live without it, but for this unreconstructed luddite, joining Twitter was a leap into the dark I wouldn't have taken unless pushed. To paraphrase Tim Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Work Week, "if Facebook is a mild stimulant, Twitter is pointless e-mail on steroids". Not a description to get a Twirgin like me forsaking the quill and ink and logging on in a hurry.

For anyone as technologically recalcitrant as me, the first hurdle is to grasp exactly what Twitter is. It's an instant messaging tool or micro-blogging portal that allows you to send messages of up to 140 characters to your friends, your acquaintances or people you've never met before. And all for free. You can message anyone on earth, including that rarefied quintet of Twitterati just mentioned, just by looking them up on a central database and becoming their 'follower'. These messages – they're called 'tweets' and are typed into a box that says, simply, 'what are you doing?' – can range from a description of your breakfast to a declaration of everlasting love. As long as you can say it in 140 characters, anything goes.

So far so easy. The next question after 'what' is 'how', and this turns out to be equally straightforward. After you've done the necessary at twitter.com, you can send a tweet as a text message from your mobile phone, from your Blackberry or as an e-mail from your computer. If it's got an electronic pulse, it'll probably suffice.

'Why' takes some explaining, however. As if the world doesn't have enough ways of keeping in touch. As well as the gloriously eccentric delights of snail mail, there's Facebook, LinkedIn, Bebo, e-mail, Blackberries, mobiles, texting, laptops – a few years ago my wife tried to give me a Swatch watch with in-built pager for Christmas, an offering that went down about as well as my present the following year (an anti-barking shock collar for my dog, since you ask). I could log on to some celebs, but do I really want to know that Wossy's daughter "wants to borrow my laptop", that broccoli gives Alan Carr wind, or that MC Hammer "leaves Boston in a couple of hours"? Equally, am I really that bothered what my friends are having for dinner (unless I'm invited) or whether they are fed up at work today? And then there's the issue of random online nutters accessing my shiny new account (note to nutter: sorry if we've met and/or you're not a nutter).

If Twitter is struggling to convert me, countless other folk have captured the zeitgeist. From a small-scale, Californian outfit founded by a trio of thirtysomething nerds just over two years ago, the service is rocketing up the technology charts. The numbers are phenomenal: Hitwise, the web measurement company, estimated in mid-2008 that traffic to Twitter had risen eightfold in the previous year, more than doubled in the previous three months and had gone up 60% on the past month. Although its traffic still trails Facebook, YouTube and the other leading social networking sites, its numbers are notoriously difficult to nail down because the vast majority of its tweets don't go via the internet, so can't be quantified by companies like Hitwise. Analysts have little doubt that it's catching up with the market leaders, though, and at an exponential rate.

There have, to be fair, been several instances that have made even me see a rationale behind Twitter. Amid all the talk of 'citizen journalists' , Twitter has been giving genuine form to what was an otherwise illusory ideal (dubbing it "Twitizen journalism"). When Mumbai, one of the most computer-literate cities on earth, was turned into a bloodbath, the city's residents sent an estimated 80 tweets every five seconds. "Mumbai terrorists are asking hotel reception for rooms of American citizens and holding them hostage on one floor," read one chilling message. Even ambulance crews used Twitter to locate wounded civilians and dodge gunmen.

Because it's possible to send a text on a signal that is too faint to allow a call, Twitter is invaluable in a disaster. The course of the Victoria bushfires unfolded via Tweeter ("Dawn at Kinglake. Those who survived the fires are coming down the mountain"), as did the plane crash days before Christmas when a Boeing 737 skidded off the runway at Colorado ("Holy f***ing shit, I was just in a plane crash!"). When Berkeley student James Buck was arrested for photographing a political demonstration in Cairo last April, he messaged "arrested" to his 48 followers and was released the next day after the college hired a lawyer for him.

Lance Armstrong even managed to get his stolen TT bike back by posting an alert via Twitter. The cyclist and cancer campaigner is an enthusiastic member of the Twitterati, but he's by no means alone. Some celeb users are veteran self-publicists (William Shatner and MC Hammer), some need public redemption and get it by bypassing a hostile conventional media and establishing a direct rapport with fans (Jonathan Ross, Russell Brand, Britney Spears and Chris Moyles), while some others have a specialist information stream (Andy Murray). By dealing direct with people who sign up to receive updates, celebrities can present themselves in whatever way they damn well choose. Ditto more eccentric and cerebral famous folk, such as John Cleese and Stephen Fry, both of whom are huge hits in Twitterdom – my delightful new friend Fry is the second most popular Tweeter in the world with 215,626 friends.

The world's foremost Twitterati also happens to be one of my new online friends. Barack Obama's startling success in wooing young voters using electronic marketing in general, and social networking sites like Twitter in particular, looks set to be a feature of all future campaigns because only 60% of people regularly check their e-mail but electioneering via mobile phones gives 100% market penetration. And it's not just election campaigns: during the Gaza invasion the Israeli Army held press conferences via Twitter and then used the addresses to bombard journalists with propaganda. News organisations such as CNN now routinely offer updates via Tweeter, as do football clubs with scorelines.

Most people, however, don't go on to Twitter to talk to Stephen Fry or to receive missives from Barack's PR lackeys: as you'd expect with a social networking site, they go on to keep up with their pals. Sure, Twitter has its fair share of the avatar-blinded souls recently identified by The American Journal of Psychiatry as Internet addicts, not to mention a healthy smattering of single-issue obsessives (you should see how many Mad Men there are in Twitterdom) but by and large it's designed for people in the real world.

That apparently means me. According to cultural commentator James Harkin, I, like the rest of us, am hard-wired to like Twitter. That's because wanting to be "in the loop" is a basic human condition, even if he then argues that we are reaching a dangerous level of digital overload because "preliminary studies from neuroscientists and psychologists suggest that our brains are likely to become strained and confused if we make too many demands on them".

That line of reasoning however, is flatly contradicted by trend consultant Annie Auerbach of research agency Flamingo. She believes the gradual ramping up of the amount of media we consume has readied us for the all-pervasive Twitter, the water-cooler for the Noughties. "The low attention span of Twitter's core demographic (25-35-year-olds] means it's the perfect medium," she says. "That age-group is used to multi-tasking, to watching television while also having a Twitter conversation about the programme they're watching.

"They use Twitter as a mini-Google, where they'll send out a Tweet – 'I'm travelling to Copenhagen, does anyone know any good shops there?' – and they know they'll get responses because they will have chosen their online community carefully. Similarly, they'll use Twitter to see if anyone knows of any jobs going." She has a point: leading Edinburgh PR agency Consolidated recently hired an executive they found on Twitter, saving themselves thousands of pounds in headhunters' fees.

"Most of all, though, they'll use it as a tool to brand themselves by putting up witty blogs, links to interesting articles or pictures," says Auerbach. "It also forces you to contribute because 'lurking' behaviour as part of a group works for a short time but is unsustainable in the long run."

Okay, I'm beginning to warm to this Twitter thing. But then she spoils it all. "I might arrive in Heathrow and let all my friends know," says Auerbach. "You may find there are other people who are also there and would like a drink, so counter-intuitively you might get more random face-to-face time through Twitter."

If that's hard to swallow, so too is the spectre of multinationals taking a real interest in Twitter. Auerbach points to the success of the price comparison website comparethemarket.com, which gained real traction by marketing its meerkat character via Twitter. Mind you, Twitter could do with some revenue stream as it is free and doesn't carry advertising, so has no income. Even so, this company of just 26 staff turned down an offer of $500m from Facebook last year. The three founders, Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams and Biz Stone, have form for making money – Williams started blogger.com and the podcasting company Odeo, both of which he eventually sold for large sums.

He's holding on to Twitter, though. Its willingness to let other companies develop complimentary programmes – MTV want to broadcast a Justin Timberlake channel via Twitter, for instance – has driven its technological advancement. Twitter must be doing something right: last year five major Chinese companies launched against them, not to mention domestic rivals such as Yammer, Tumbler and Hictu. "Micro-blogging has real legs and is here to stay: it doesn't take up too much time and the payback is great," says Auerbach.

As for me, I'm still not convinced, but I'll give it some thought while sitting listening to the gramophone, dispatching hand-written letters by carrier-pigeon and toasting my muffins in front of the fire.