Everyone it seems, is "tweeting".

CNN has a tweeter board where zebranuts47 can share with us political incite in less than 140 characters. NBA players are tweetering at half time during the playoffs. Politicians are letting us know where they are and what they are doing much to the chagrin of their security details.

I am fascinated by this process and wondered if I am being left out.

In the last six months I have been taking informal polls during class and asking students what they think of twitter. About half to be fair have no idea what it is. The other half looks at me with a strange expression.

I pull up the website on the overhead projector and it says "Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?"

The class is silent and it is as if I can hear them thinking, "isn't the problem obvious?"

Curious as a hacker, I looked into the topic a bit further. I wondered that if someone wanted to let "followers" know exactly what they were doing how granular this could be. In a tech support forum they state:

What are the limits?

We're starting with a few limits based on various parameters, and we'll be adding more as time goes on. We reveal some limits only when you reach them, and tell you about others in advance. Twitter applies limits to any person who reaches:

• 1,000 total updates per day, on any and all devices
• 250 total direct messages per day, on any and devices
• 70 API requests per hour
• Maximum number of follow attempts in a day
  

It is a good thing they aren’t revealing too much in the error messages until certain circumstances. We appreciate that. It also seems as though we can only tell people 1000 times a day what we are doing at any given moment. What a shame.

Is twitter narcissism, extreme voyeurism or spam on steroids? Email is a necessity for business, but twittering is not (yet). People will volunteer their junk to extremes on twittter because the 140 character limit invites cleverness. Email can't imagine the ways people will embarrass themselves using the twitter service.

Regretful tweets are searchable by anyone with an account. To err is human. but to err on tweeter is archived forever. A service called Tweleted allows the search of deleted tweets.

On accessing the site (http://tweleted.com) the following error was given:

" Twitter's losing some messages from public view at the minute. It's not our fault! The results here might be temporarily vanished, not deleted. Click "check »" to be sure."

What data are we missing! (sarcasm)