As you probably know, IM conversations are prone to the occasional missed step or dropped thread. I wondered briefly what she was talking about. A cute browser, I wondered? But I had faith… and then there it was, a link.  Here’s what I saw:

No denying, it’s cute. But I was still none the wiser. I knew that Margaret is a dog person and, in fact, has raised guide dogs. That’s a cute pup, I said. “What kind is it?” It’s a fennec, she told me. A little fox. (Comprehension was, you’ll be glad to hear, swift and, well, comprehensive: Big Firefox: full-sized fox mascot. Small verson: small fox mascot. Gotcha.)

At least at this point, the mobile adaptation of Firefox is named for a small, desert-dwelling fox. Here’s a video demo:

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All clear? Me too. Now I wonder what this week's IMs will bring...

~ Ivy Wigmore 

Isn’t it just it a presence messaging on steroids? What about a free global SMS addressbook? Or a hyperlink-enabled persistent chatroom? To be fair, I don’t hear that last often, but summing up what Twitter is and what it does is challenging — especially in 140 characters or less. Twitter’s own “social messaging utility where people can communicate in real-time” comes close. Twitter’s creators know better than most what they’ve created and how it works.

Other takes on Twitter range far and wide:

• Caroline Middlebrook described Twitter as “an incredibly powerful marketing & community building tool.”
• In a long post that describes how he discovered Twitter and how SocialText is using it, Ross Mayfield called Twitter “mobile social software that lets you broadcast and receive short messages with your social network” aka, “Continuous partial presence.”
• Wendy Boswell writes that Twitter is a “mini-blogging platform that you can use to send messages of 140 characters or less to family, friends, or just the general Web community.”
• Dave Winer explains Twitter as a network of users on a microblogging platform with its own open-identity system and ecosystem.
• Ed Kohler posted that Twitter is “a social networking site based around text messaging.”

WhatIsTwitter.com is addressing the question by hosting a contest that asks you to explain Twitter in 140 seconds. (It runs through 6/23/08, if you’d like to enter.)

When I tweeted the question to the Twitter community, Robbert replied that Twitter was “a great way to get in touch and ‘meet’ very interesting people!” and Liz tweeted back that “Twitter is a window into other people’s worlds. Scholars can get insulated so it is nice to hear the ups & downs in other fields.”

In the end, however, I think a shade on Wikipedia’s current definition comes closest: a free distributed social networking and microblogging service that may be updated from the Web, IM, cellphone or a desktop client.

The question of what, exactly, you can DO with Twitter is something else altogether. The session at Enterprise 2.0 devoted to microblogging addressed exactly that question. The discussion was lively, both in person and on Twitter itself, as we could all see on the screen as Laura Fitton (@pistachio) Twittered about the event.

Even though at least one member in the audience questioned the etiquette of such an embedded distraction, with respect to her engagement with the rest of the panel, the bulk of the conversation between the other Twitterers in the audience and those present was inquisitive, supportive and engaged. You can see the various streams of conversation around the session and the conference in general at Twemes.com by using the hashtags #e20, #en20 and #ent20.

With the notable exception of Loren Feldman from 1938Media, the panelists supported the idea of Twitter or something like it (call it “X enterprise microblogging platform”) being both useful and present within an enterprise in the near future.

So what’s the story? Have I lost you yet? Do many of the terms above need further explanation? A colleague looked at me recently with a quirked eyebrow and asked me if I seriously expected her to ask conference-going IT professionals to “Tag their tweets on Twitter” and all I could do was grin.

Like so many emergent services and ecosystems on the Web, Twitter has evolved its own lingo. I’ve blogged about Twitter for WhatIs.com before, of course, but it’s worth reviewing the basics. Here’s a quick guide to get you started and give you some of your own”Twitter-fu.”

The Basics: For the novice Twitter user

By now, the story of how Twitter came to be has been extensively documented, so I’ll leave it to others to tell the tale. Check out this great video from Common Craft, Twitter in Plain English:

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You can update Twitter from Twitter.com, which is how the majority of users access the service, from instant messenger or by texting to “40404″ with a cellphone registered with the service. If you do use a cellphone, remember that there may be associated charges for text messages of .10 or .15 per message. Early adopters of the Twitter and the iPhone discovered to their chagrin that thousands of texts got quite expensive. If you’re planning on using your cellphone to tweet, seriously consider investing in an unlimited text messaging plan.

No matter what, you’ll need to register first. Choose the username that fits you, your brand, your company, service, product or simply your whim. Try to make it as short as possible; you want to reserve as much space as possible for others to use in replies, since they’ll need to include your username in a reply.

Here’s where one of the conventions that Twitter has introduced into the Web comes into play. Instead of remembering both a username and a domain name (johndoe@yahoo.com), all you have to do is remember a username (@johndoe). Just type in go to twitter.com, add the user name to the url and click “follow.”

If you want to publicly reply to a tweet from another user, just include @johndoe in your message and he or she will automatically see it. Just click “replies” on your Twitter page to see how has responded to you. You can also direct message another user by typing “d johndoe” — but only if they are following you. This is quite useful for conversation you don’t want the entire Web to be involved in.

There are other etiquette concerns, paralleling netiquette on the rest of the Web; read Chris Brogan’s post Considering Social Media Etiquette and Grammer Girl’s Twitter Style Guide to get a flavor of the conventions at play.

Ready to go? Start at the Twitter homepage, which includes a useful Twitter FAQ TwitterFeed. Each time you post to Twitter, it’s called a “tweet.” Each tweet has its own URL, just like a “normal” blog post has a permalink. Twitter’s 140 character limit means that brevity is crucial, so using URL shorteners like TinyURL.com is a must. You can make your first update just like a blog post on Blogger or WordPress. “Hello World” would work, if you’re stuck for inspiration.

Twitter isn’t much fun, however, if you’re just twittering into the ether. To get the most from the service, you’ll need to find some friends or find interesting feeds to follow, like @MarsPhoenix or @BarackObama. MC Hammer is out there too, by the way. You can always just search for people you know on Twitter or go to a user’s profile page if you already know someone you want to “follow.” Once you get rolling, you can use a service like WhoShouldIFollow.com to find more friends.

Following means that you’ll get all of that person’s updates, so choose carefully. If you choose to follow top Twitterers, expect to see a lot of messages. This is a great way to discover interesting new people, however, so even if you don’t follow @Scobleizer, @LeoLaporte , @JasonCalacanis, @KevinRose or other A-list bloggers or “cewebrities,” make sure to check their profiles to see who they’ve discovered. You can always unsubscribe if someone posts content or links you don’t want to see in your feed.

The other symbol you’ll see often is the hashtag, which is the Twitter version of a social bookmark. Think of them as a way to add your tweets to niche conversations, specific events or around products or services. Learn more at hashtags.org. I mentioned them earlier when I listed the various hashtags for the Enterprise 2.0 Conference. By adding a # sign and then a series of numbers and letters afterwards (try #beatLA, for Celtics-lovers) your tweets will be aggregated into the great conversation.

Twitter has opened its application programming interface (API) to the development community , which has responded by creating many desktop clients that you can use to update the service, manage your messages and friends.

To use my favorite client, Twirl, you’ll need to download Adobe AIR and install Twirl as a desktop client. Twirl includes a URL shortener and many other features that, in my humble opinion, richly enhance your Twitter experience. Twirl can also be configured to post automatically to Pownce and Jaiku, two other popular microblogging services. If you use a Mac, Twitterific might be a good fit, too.

Rafe Needleman has posted a terrific “Newbie’s Guide to Twitter” over at Webware.com, which I highly recommend if you’re still having trouble getting started.

Getting into the conversation: For the intermediate Twitter user

Now that you’ve gotten your feet wet, here are some more services to expand your horizons.

You can monitor whatever keyword you choose, like your name or your company’s brandname, at Tweetscan. Even if you don’t choose to use Twitter actively, this is an important component of brand and reputation management.

You can see threaded conversations with Quotably. This is a useful tool if you want to see an entire back and forth between users in one place.

Similarly, Summize helps you track Twitter conversations in real-time.

Use Mobile Twitter if you have a BlackBerry, Treo or other smartphone with a browser or try out Hahlo.com if you have an iPhone.

There’s a dedicated BlackBerry client called TwitterBerry too, which is worth looking into if you’re a “CrackBerry Addict.”

Quakk, Tiny Twitter, TwitToday and Twobile all work as clients for Windows Mobile 5.

Facebook has a Twitter application that embeds your tweets in your profile and allows you to tweet from within the social networking environment.

You can display your latest tweets automatically on your blog with an embedded widget, like this Twitter widget for WordPress or the Twitter Widget for Blogger.

Or, if you want to hook up your blog’s feed to Twitter, Twitterfeed will be helpful.

Watch Twittervision to see a mashup of a global Google Map and location-specific tweets.

Use TwitPic to share photos on Twitter.

For the Advanced Twitter User

If you’ve gotten this far and have been nodding your head all the time, waiting for something new, congratulations: Your Twitter-Fu is strong. The Twitter Fan Wiki should be your resource of choice, where new applications, services and software is aggregated and vetted by a strong user community. If you’re an alpha geek, make sure to check out the scripts page, which is chock full of geeky goodness.

I’m far from the first to try to explain what Twitter is an how it works, of course. Make sure to check out Tweeternet.com for an excellent explanation and outstanding list of Twitter tools.

If you’ve mastered the basic and intermediate tools and technologies, consider the following ways that Twitter has been put to good use:

• As a social justice tool, where people in critical situations can get the news out quickly
• As a crisis response and management tool (check out @RedCross)
• As a presence tool for emergency workers or individuals in a natural disaster zone

If you have questions, thoughts, additional resources, uses or any other response to this post, please use the comments. And, of course, Twitter about it. Do you think Twitter — or a client like it — is right for your business or enterprise? Let us know!

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The application pulls multiple forms of rich media and communication streams into a single dashboard. 

The desktops of many office workers these days often contains all of these communications forms already; they’re just not combined into a single, slick interface or administrated by centralized controls.  Given the risk that any organization, much less enterprise, takes in  allowing employees to install multiple third party applications for IM, VoIP, email, RSS, videoconferencing and web-based widgets for anything and everything else, it’s perhaps not surprising that vendors are stepping in to offer some control to sysadmins.

The two-person team that make up CommonCraft (Sachi and Lee LeFever) put it simply: they solve explanation problems.

I love that tagline. It’s rather similar sort of thing we try to do here at WhatIs.com. To that point, I’ve embedded three of CommonCraft’s previously released videos on our site, each of which explore and explain a different social media technology:

• RSS in Plain English
• Wikis in Plain English
• Social Networking in Plain English

The newest addition to the mix is a video explaining what Twitter is and how it works.

As you may know, Twitter is a popular microblogging service that launched almost exactly one year ago at the SXSW Music Festival in Austin, Texas. While we’ve blogged about it right afterwards. Due in no small part to the high percentage of geeks and “digerati” at the festival who had the opportunity to try it out and start networking with each other, Twitter really took off. Twitter is now a leader in the “social messaging” category that includes Pownce and Jaiku, spanning the gap between our online and offline worlds. Each allows users to update a microblogging service using SMS messages, a Web interface or a desktop application. (Twitter relies on third party apps for the last based upon its APIs. Try Snitter if you have Adobe Air installed.)

CommonCraft’s video sheds worthwhile additional insight. Watch it below:

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There’s plenty of interesting activity going on out there, too. Just check out this mashup of Twitter, Google Maps and live election results for intriguing insights into the 2008 presidential primary season.

And if you’d like to find/follow me on Twitter, head over to http://twitter.com/digiphile.

These are the sorts of thoughts that occur as I poke around in the definition database, reviewing likely suspects for Words of the Day.  WhatIs has been around since 1996, when founder Lowell Thing started his little “dining room table experiment in hypertext.” Eleven calendar years ago. I’m not sure how long ago that is in Web years, for which the calibration must always be ramping up. However long the years since, though, what it means for us editors is a whole lot of updating.

We try, with varying success, to make definitions as future shock proof as we can without compromising the value of current information. Today’s Word of the Day, Antikythera mechanism, lends itself to that approach pretty well. You don’t expect a lot to change on a 2000-year-old computer. But for breaking news and link rot, we’re pretty much set with that one.

On the other hand, there are those definitions that seem to have been written in a simpler time, probably in the last century. Occasionally, I review a definition that predicts future developments that have either not panned out or have proven so prescient that all we have to do is change the tenses and phrases like “might become” to “is.”

Take silicon cockroach for example. I came across that one yesterday, looking for WODs for the weekend. John Sidgmore coined the term back in ’98 to refer to the multiplicity of small electronic devices that he predicted would prevail in the future. We added the definition in ’01. Now, as we flip lightly over into ’08, I see that not only do the tenses need to be changed from future to present but a host of new life forms added to the species. No mention of MP3 players, GPS , USB drives…

What does our definition say now? Well … that depends. How far into the future are you reading it?
~ Ivy Wigmore

Online, “stop the presses” just doesn’t cut it. It’s a nearly universal experience to have clicked “send” before the message or attachment is ready for its audience — or post, in the age of the blogosphere, YouTube and Twitter. And it’s not just novice users that wish they had thought twice before responding or composing their thoughts. Part of the job here at WhatIs.com is always making sure that our copy and links are accurate and working, whether you find our content though this blog, within our definitions or learning content or in any of the new media types that have appeared on the site over the past few years, like podcasts, embedded videos or screencasts.

Earlier today, unfortunately, came one of the moments that editors cringe to admit, where a grammatical rule was broken and a wild card character made its way into one of the few remaining digital media forms that can’t be recalled: the email newsletter. Once it goes out of the mail server, there’s no calling your words back. WhatIs.com sends out a Word of the Day newsletter (Subscribe ere), each weekday, chosen from among the thousands of IT-related terms in the database. Our editors write three questions to go along with the term, usually written to match whatever the theme of the term might be — mobile computing, open source, SAP, CRM or perhaps whatever major tech events has occurred recently.

The three categories of tech trivia include:

• a Secret Word of the Day, where we describe a term without naming it
• an IT Acronym Challenge, where we test your ability to make sense of the alphabet soup
• and a Daily Tech Trivia question, which can be about nearly anything related to technology or current events

Today’s Word of the Day was BotHunter, which meant that our questions centered on security and threat management. The final question should have read as follows:

In IT security, AAA means more than roadside assistance. A AAA server is a server program that handles user requests for access to computer resources and “AAA” services. What do the three A’s stand for in AAA server?
Answer

When I originally wrote the question, I heard “triple A” in my head when I read AAA, a symptom of depending on a certain highway assistance service for decades. In the context of IT security, however, AAA is pronounced by saying each letter separately, or “Ay Ay Ay,” spelling out the acronym. That means that “an” is correct, not “a” as I wrote in the newsletter, just as it is in our definition for AAA server. My apologies to you, dear reader, for the mistake.

If you’re further interested in the correct pronunciation for some of the most commonly mispronounced terms in IT, make sure to consult our guide, How do you pronounce IT? You can see the correct phonics and hear the word spoken aloud by yours truly. Leave us a voice message if you disagree, approve or want to add to the list.

And from ocean to ocean, and all the way to the permafrost, the Stripes are setting new standards of cool on this tour, especially with their secret shows. Unscheduled pre-concert gigs are a tradition for many big acts. However, as you might expect, the Stripes are doing it a little differently. On the flash mob model, Jack & Meg have been getting the word out to fans — via texting, forum posts and WOM buzz — about free appearances where no band has gone before:

They played an inner city youth centre in Edmonton

They played a transit bus in Winnipeg

The Stripes also played a little backup for a local busker in Winnipeg. (See video.)

They played a bowling alley in Saskatoon

They played for 40 seriously ill kids at the Bronson Center in Ottawa.

Occasionally, I become a little disenchanted with technology, and daydream about going incommunicado on some remote desert island. But tech is constantly expanding our ability to connect, and making events like that secret show possible. And — really — how cool is that?

~ Ivy Wigmore

When .Mac was introduced in 2002, being a long-time Apple user, I jumped on that bandwagon. I have to admit, however, that even with Apple’s update of the Web-based email client to a richer, AJAX-heavy interface, gmail is now my clear preference. The fact that it’s free and has a much higher storage limit are almost besides the point; I can access gmail on the go and it doesn’t constantly time out, not to mention the seamless integration of gchat with other gmail users.

It’s quite possible, even likely, that Steve Jobs & Co. will update .Mac, including email, when the iPhone is released at the end of the month. I’ll be keeping my eyes peeled. Recent reports of a dangerous hole in Google Desktop, along with the constant flow of spam and the malware occasionally associated with it, have kept me looking for better way to secure my online messaging, especially when I exchange email with someone who desires a digital signature or encrypted email.

Enter FireGPG. Thanks to popurls, which I love to use to get a snapshot of the Web’s “hive mind” at any given time, I found this great Firefox extension that allows you to encrypt, decrypt, sign and verify your gmail. Just head over to firegpg.tuxfamily.org to download the extension. Of course, as the developers of FireGPG note, it’s just a key management tool. If you’re unfamiliar with PGP, you can review our definition for Pretty Good Privacy. GnuPG is quite similar to PGP, with the notable difference of being free sofware released under the GNU General Public License. GnuPG is managed by the GNU project, with complete and free implementation of the OpenPGP standard as defined by RFC2440. You can download GnuPG here.

Make sure to review Dmitri Popov’s excellent post at Linux.com for more information, if you’re interested in trying FireGPG out.

Enjoy your privacy!

Twitter, along with its founders, was recently profiled in the New York Times’ Business section, along with the service, in “From Many Tweets, One Loud Voice on the Internet.” Jason Pontin, the author of the article, described Twitter as :

“…a heady mixture of messaging; social networking of the sort associated with Web sites like MySpace; the terse, jittery personal revelations of “microblogging” found on services like Jaiku; and something called “presence,” shorthand for the idea that people should enjoy an “always on” virtual omnipresence. “

As Jason points out, Twitter is currently one of the fastest growing trends on the Internet. Adoption really took off after the 2007 South by Southwest Music, Film and Interactive Conference (SXSW) which was absolutely saturated with Twittering. And it’s not just bloggers and new media mavens — U.S. presidential candidate John Edwards is using Twitter as he moves around the country.

What is Twitter? It’s a simple service with an Ajax-y Web presence that allows users to share where they are, what they’re doing and how they can be contacted. You can post to Twitter using SMS, much like Blogger or other tools. The difference is that the platform then sends those posts to a group of subscribers (friends, clients, family) by phone alerts and to your channel on Twitter. Users can turn off mobile alerts if they like — an important feature, judging from the feedback that, for some, Twitter is rather addictive. The service is currently free, though interested parties should check with their mobile telephony providers regarding SMS charges, which are certain to rise with greater use.

Twitter is part of Obvious Corporation in San Francisco, California. For up-to-date info about Twitter, make sure to visit the Twitter blog.

Tweet, tweet!

Amit Agarwal offers a quick Google Alerts tutorial on his blog if you’re interested in learning more.