Wired article that sumarises the movement towards decentralising Twitter-like microblogging services.

A fair amount of common sense in this post for people wondering how to start using Twitter without making a tit of themselves.

This is a rather good guide to starting to engage with Twitter by giving in a purpose. I'd imagine what follows is a more social use of the service but you have to start somewhere.

Lightweight and lighthearted but useful etiquette guide to using everyone's favourite microblogging status update ambient cloud community tool.

Interesting TechCrunch analysis (I didn't know TechCrunch did analysis, I thought they just did news) on what makes Twitter work. I'd agree with a lot of this.

" Twitter works and enjoys such strong attachment because it provides real-time access to a well-defined audience. The backlog of all previous tweets is a guarantee of permanence (you can even search it) and you can catch up on it anytime. As a result, people use Twitter because they have an idea of who will see their lightweight messages and this sense of audience is reinforced by @replies, re-tweets and references in future conversations (online and offline).

"Designing for the sense of Audience is a powerful tool to create cohesion and a sense of utility among users of a service. This lesson from Twitter can apply to many other services too. But before leaving the current discussion, it’s helpful to look at a service that has missed the full power of Audience so far."

Roundup of the history and current state of play in the URL shortening industry (tinyurl, et al) which introduces us to <a href="http://bit.ly/">bit.ly</a> which works in a more internet-native way using "distributed index and multiple servers" to deal with scalability issues.

Obviously not something I'll be following long term but it'll be interesting to see what they do with this. Looks promising.

I like this. When Twitter is down you put what you were going to tweet in here and then when Twitter is up it sends them to Twitter. Magic.

He's a lot more positive than me. I can see where he's coming from with the bigger picture but I don't think Plurk is quite there yet.

A Twitter-esque thing that is having it's 15 minutes in the sun. I'm not that convinced personally but will withhold judgement.