Twitter anyone?

Unless you've been living under a bush somewhere, you've likely heard of Twitter. It’s the micro-blogging service that lets users (“senders”) send out short messages up to 140 characters in length (“tweets”) to anyone who has subscribed to them (“followers”). In its most mundane form (and maybe most personal) a follower can read all about someone’s day in small and frequent updates… “Had beans for breakfast! Yum” or “Passed my econ final, finally!” or “Not sure what to wear today, blue or green” …you get the drift. But Twitter has moved beyond the minute by minute comments about someone’s life to getting small amounts of information quickly in a variety of formats (twitter web site, web browser, instant messaging, or mobile phone) about a variety of subjects from the meaningful (news bulletins, emergency situations, public interest, presidential campaigns) to the not-so-meaningful (follow the exciting lives of Ashton Kutcher or Britney Spears). And with the ability to embed shortened website links into tweets, senders can send out a snippet of a story that can link directly to a lengthy blog or web entry.

So what does this have to do with RAVALA? Well, not surprisingly there are twitter entries from a variety of book related sources that are starting to show up on the tweetosphere:

TwitterLit (twitterlit.com) sends out a literary teaser twice daily - posting the first line of a book, without the author's name or book title, but with a link to Amazon so readers can see what book the line is from.

The Book Blog from Readers Read sends out tweets regarding new book information such as “New Robert Langdon novel from Dan Brown, The Lost Symbol, arrives in stores 9-15-09. Huge first printing of 5 million. http://bit.ly/UAdYJ” or “Harper Collins will publish two new Michael Crichton books posthumously. http://tr.im/iow0” with links to more detailed information on their blog.

Borders uses Twitter for new book/music/movie news while Barnes and Noble use it for updates to their many book clubs.

Publishers Weekly tweets about new book-related information.

Authors love to tweet… hey they write for a living, so it’s a natural fit.Here's a list of 100+ Best Authors on Twitter. Meg Cabot, Chuck Palahniuk, Harlan Coben, Neil Gaiman, they all be tweetin'

And of course ALD is twittering, or is it tweeting… anyway we do it!

And then, as often the case in Web 2.0, users take a new technology and morph it into something else… so there are now books being created using twitter (in 140 character increments) and books condensed into tweets (Pride and Prejudice - janeaustin: Woman meets man called Darcy who seems horrible. He turns out to be nice really. They get together.)

As for me, I’m no tweeter yet, and I have no interest in what someone had for dinner, be it my Uncle Earl or Neil Gaiman, but I do subscribe to a number of blogs and sorting through 50-100 blog entries a day is tedious, so having the blog condensed into a tweet with a link to an entry that interests me seems intriguing.

How about you? Are you a tweet follower? A tweet sender? What’s your opinion?

And no Sylvester & Tweety Bird jokes please!