twitter

=== Originally published at: The Agile Approach ===

In the ’90s romantic comedy that we borrowed the title from, a chain of dramatic events take place, while the main character (played by Peter Gallagher) is in a post-accident coma.

Comatose sleep is a little too dramatic for this, but just in case you spent the last couple of years on a beautiful island, away from the daily strains of the everyday life in the 21st century, let us list some of the major, latest technical advancements for you. For the less-fortunate rest of us, who did not get to lounge on an island, this is a chance to look back and identify new technologies that have changed the way we live and operate, but were not around just couple of years ago.

Twitter

Twitter took off during 2007 SXSW festival. This 140-character-limit social messaging service revolutionized the Internet landscape by inventing, and at the same time monopolizing, a completely new phenomena: Micro-Blogging. The invention was so successful that it went far beyond the initial idea and became the most effective way to share ideas on the Web.

Linked Data

Twitter is one of the tech wonders that really took off last year. According to Compete.com number of unique visitors to Twitter has increased almost 10 times from Dec '07 to Dec '08. If we also account for the fact that most Twitter users use it from desktop applications that are not easy to track, the actual usage numbers are probably even more impressive. No doubt, that's a mind-bobbling success for any Web-based business.

But what is Twitter? The Twitter website describes itself as follows:

Now, that does not sound too interesting. Let's be honest: most people don't do anything worth announcing across the world. Unless you are some kind of serious travel-addict or a wild celebrity of sorts, which most of us, are not. Who wants to read meaningless messages like: "Went out to get some food from McDonalds. Recession, indeed" from dozens of people?

Then why do millions of people use Twitter?

Very interesting: Twitter is abandoning Ruby on Rails due to claimed scalability problems:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/01/twitter-said-to-be-abandoning-ruby-...