How Users Took Over Twitter

In an amazingly short time, Twitter -- the messaging service which does little more than circulate bursts of text limited to 140 characters to a list of people who have chosen to receive them -- has established itself as a staple of social networking, commerce, electioneering, celebrity culture, public relations, media, and political protest. According to internal documents leaked earlier this year, the company expects to have 25 million active users by the end of 2009 and 100 million by the end of 2010. In 2013, it hopes to become the first Internet service to sign up 1 billion users. Can something as elementary as Twitter become an enduring pillar of the Internet? Perhaps. Twitter rocketed into the mainstream without really knowing what its service was. Its users defined it. It was those users who made Twitter into a throbbing global sensing organism that delivers instant opinion and eyewitness reporting on everything from presidential debates to football injuries. Though the company held a discussion earlier this year called "What Do We Want to Be When We Grow Up?" the mission statement is still a work in progress. "If there are three sentences I'd use to describe Twitter, one of them would be 'I don't know.'"