Towards an understanding of social software: the case of Arinia #microblogging

This app allows users to share text, tasks and files. Much like topics in Quora, activities in Teambox can be followed by users who need to stay updated, publish updates to their team or view the related stream of information. Projects are invite-only, and users can choose who the collaborators will be and determine permissions for each person.

It is said that an economist is someone who sees something that works in practice and wonders whether it works in theory. Twitter clearly works in practice - and if you want practical advice, watch Laura Fitton's Tech talk at Google, or read her Twitter for Dummies. I've learned a lot from talking to her and others about this phenomenon, and I wanted to write about some theories that help me understand it.

Did you know that your tweets have an expiration date on them? While they never really disappear from your own Twitter stream, they become unsearchable in only a matter of days. At first, Twitter held onto your tweets for around a month, but as the service grew more popular, this "date limit" has dramatically shortened. According to Twitter's search documentation, the current date limit on the search index is "around 1.5 weeks but is dynamic and subject to shrink as the number of tweets per day continues to grow."

"Twitter is a social network used by millions of people, and thousands more are signing up every day to send short messages to groups of friends. But where's the user manual for Twitter? Where do new Twitter users go to learn about Tweeting, retweets, hashtags and customizing your Twitter profile? Where do you go if you want to know all about building a community on Twitter, or using Twitter for business? How can you find advanced tools for using Twitter on your phone or your desktop? To answer all these questions and more, we've assembled The Twitter Guide Book, a complete collection of resources for mastering Twitter. Happy Tweeting!"

TwitterWhere lets you generate an RSS or XML Feed to filter out Tweets around a certain area. Just enter a city, state, postal code, choose the range of miles you want to include, and hit the button. You'll instantly get URLs to add to your RSS reader.

We’re fans of Twitter around here, in fact many Automatticians have accounts, but while the format appealed to us it really just whetted our appetite for something more, like a way for each of us to share short messages about what we’re doing or worki