Twitter Use 3

Twitter can be a reason to justify the purchase of a souped-up cell phone, and a 2-year service contract potentially costing a couple of thousand dollars.

One of its founders was focused on designing a service for taxi drivers constantly on the go, and that approach has translated to new cell phones and mobile devices with screens, quick (sometimes unlimited) internet access, keyboards, cameras, and video cameras.  These phones often have scaled-down browsers, nano-size keyboards, and 2-inch or 3-inch screens, so there is a limited number of things to do on the web.  Twitter's character limit on Tweets puts mobile phone users typing with their thumbs on the same footing as regular computer users bashing away at keyboards.  Twitter reaches full flower when used on a cell phone.

There is also a cool factor.  If you just bought an iPhone 3Gs ($699 for the 32GB model, without a contract) or an Android (the phone so powerful, its web site hung my browser), you need to have a reason to take it out of your pocket.  Twitter gives you that reason.