TWITTER is not going on TV. Not officially, at least.
The San Francisco-based site, with an estimated 14 million users at last count, wants to put "players on the trail of celebrities in an interactive, competitive format," Associated Press reported last Wednesday.
But Twitter has since clarified it is only playing a bit part to help the producers of the show, in a "lightweight, non-exclusive agreement".
On TV or not, Twitter is hot.
Its list of celeb users reads like a who's who, including talk show queen Oprah Winfrey, NBA star Shaquille O'Neal and actor Ashton Kutcher, who use it to reach and keep their fans.
Why, even the news that Mr Horst Koehler won the German presidential elections broke first on the chirp-chat system - the Internet's answer to SMS.
In fact, the news on the voting results were out 15 minutes earlier than the official announcement on May 23, courtesy of two tweeting parliamentarians Julia Kloeckner and Ulrich Kelber.
The biggest thing about Twitter is the people factor, said assistant professor Vivian Chen from the division of communication research at Nanyang Technological University's Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information.
"It's immediate and gives you possibilities," said the academic who focuses on how technology influences social relationships.
"You can have the whole world as your audience and you never know who's going to tell you what."
Cheerful chirp
Founded by Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams in 2006, Twitter is a service that combines text messaging and blogging.
Marketing research company Comscore estimated that the site had 32 million unique visitors in April.
The company is still a small 45-strong start-up, but like Google, Twitter has already become a verb for the Internet saavy.
It is not hard to see why.
For one thing, it has shaped the individual's sense of news-making.
The immediacy of updates - posted real-time - mean that news of some of the big recent events, like the Mumbai terror attacks in November 2008 and the US Airways plane crash in Hudson River in January this year, broke first on Twitter.
Eyewitnesses simply snapped pictures and sent their updates via their mobile phones to Twitter and the news world picked up the thread and did the rest.
It was on Twitter that Belinda Ong, 27, who works in the events management industry, heard about the inferno in Beijing that gutted a China Central Television building in February.
To catch up on the Twitter game, major news outlets such as CNN and BBC have scrambled to get their own news in, using Twitter to push out the latest headlines to stay relevant.
As a result, the service is also often used by people as a news feed.
"They are one-liners so you can just skim through them really quickly. It's like going through 20 newspapers at one go and only reading the headlines," said Patricia Law from Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence group in Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide.
Talk to many or just one
Twitter has also changed the rules of interaction: It allows people to follow one another, interacting with those they might otherwise not have access to.
On as big a stage as they want: In the 2008 US elections, President Barack Obama used it to update his supporters on his fight against presidential hopeful John McCain.
Or, in the most personal of circles: Belinda once tweeted home-grown singer Joi Chua and got a reply.
"I told her that I was singing her song at a karaoke and it was so hard to sing it nearly killed me," quipped Belinda.
She is also going on a lunch date with one of her favourite authors this week, whom she met through Twitter.
She had been asking Martin Roll, who wrote Asian Branding Strategy, questions about social media and marketing over Twitter and took the opportunity to ask the Singapore-based author out for lunch. He agreed.
It is regular conversations like these that have probably upped Twitter's cred and its ratings.
Like coffee-shop conversations with friends, you can interject status updates - answering the question, What are you doing now? - with your own pithy observations.
You can also ask questions and interrupt any time on Twitter.
The difference, though, is that you can listen in on the talk going on at all the different tables.
Plus, plug into the conversations of thousands of people, which is more than any coffee shop can fit.
Said Prof Chen: "People nowadays are used to socialising through a mediated platform, where it allows them to connect to more people, rather than just daily faces."
Sure, there are those who use it to update others ad nauseum about what they are thinking of eating or doing.
Posts such as "Fish and chips for lunch I think" and "I need new running shoes asap" often fill up Twitter pages.
While some like to talk, others like their questions answered.
Like schoolboy Xavier Lur, 15, Singapore's most popular Twitterer with 55,000 followers.
"If I'm faced with any problems such as computer bugs or viruses...I'd head to Twitter and post a question about it, because I can get a reply within a minute or so and the answers are pretty accurate," he said.
Or as Patricia said: "I could be tweeting something completely nonsensical and which doesn't serve any real purpose, but it says that I have a personality.
"It makes me a real person to the reader. It's the same reason why we watch reality TV."
yuenc@sph.com.sg
This story was first published in The Straits Times Digital Life.
