Netizen

Short Is Sweet: Postcards Begat SMS Begat Twitter TechCrunch You simply cannot go over 140 characters. And more often than you may imagine, that’s enough. ....... they looked at postcards and found that most of those had messages of 150 characters or less. ..... I never thought of the limitation in a negative sense, but rather as something that could inspire creativity in messages. And could even spur communication. ..... With a 140 character limit, a correlation between briefness and rudeness doesn’t exist. ..... It’s a limitation that is liberating.

Tweets are building blocks to many things. 140 characters are quite enough to say something to someone in conversation mode. You say then you listen. But the real magic of tweets is that you can insert a shortened URL into those 140 characters. That is what has been the game changer. That is what led to the concept of real time search. If a tree fell in the forest, but noone was there to witness, did the tree actually fall? Tweets have challenged massive data centers on Google property. Twitter is saying they don't need to index the websites. They just need to see what sites and pages people are visiting at any one point in time.

Twitter has nowhere close to attained critical mass, but it is only a matter of time before it does. So, yes, postcards are cool, SMS is handy, and Twitter is all the rage.

I know of people who don't blog no more, they tweet. They check email less often, they tweet. There are people who don't do RSS no more, they tweet. Twitter is where they place their bookmarks.

Atoms are building blocks. They, by definition, are small. Tweets are building blocks.

I think there is an underlying logic to the 140 characters limit we have not pinned down yet.

The Internet is the future. And that future is multilingual. This is the Internet century, and this century is multilingual. This world was always multilingual. But in this century, for the first time, we will see that lingual diversity celebrated as the natural order of things instead of a nuisance or worse. America is Europe, the Internet is America. The Internet is the new country. The Internet is the new frontier, the wild wild west. The Internet is the new moon to reach out to.

You could learn new languages if you wanted to but you don't have to. You don't have to wait for all the world's knowledge to get translated from English into your local language by really smart human beings who put out tomes of translated literature. Machines will translate on demand in real time. That changes things.

You should be able to chat with someone in their own language without learning their language, in real time.

All knowledge is local. All local knowledge is global. And that too in real time. That is the Internet way.

Communication and creation/consumption will go unhindered. Languages will not get in the way. The idea that the smartest people in every culture need to learn English first, that is passe. That is so 20th century. Many still might, but not because it is demanded of them.

I love the English language, but I love linguistic diversity more. Linguistic diversity is the humanity flowering the way it is meant to flower. Each human being is unique just like each snowflake is unique. Each sentence each human being naturally speaks is unique. Is that something or is that something? Finally we have the technology to map that uniqueness. The Internet is mapping software.