Twitter is rapidly taking off and may soon become as familiar a term as ‘blog’ or ‘Instant Message’. It’s a combination of the two, with some RSS thrown in – you get 140 characters to say “What Are You Doing Now” but of course, anything goes. Your friends can see your comments appear on their feed or blog. Its advantage over IM is that it can send IM-like messages to hundreds of friends, since you can’t send an IM to 000’s of people. And because each post is limited to 140 characters Twit feeds can be added to a web page or blog without fear of super-long posts screwing up the design.Obvious uses for artistes include tour diaries, daily chatter and studio updates. However you’re going to need to be a fairly gregarious person to constantly want to update fans on what you’re up to. Labels could naturally use it as a very simple way to feed news to fan sites and venues can post new dates. Some enterprising programmers have already tapped into the BBC news feeds to offer them as Twit feeds and obviously, publishers such as NME could create their own.
