By now, you've probably heard of Twitter, a microblogging application that helps you stay connected with your friends.
Your answers (up to 140 characters in length) to the question "What are you doing?" (also known as tweets) are displayed on your twitter page and delivered to other users ( friends) who have signed up to receive them. You may allow only your friends to receive the tweets or make them public.
Here is how the engineers at Twitter explain how they assemble their product.
We built Twitter using Ruby on Rails because it allows us to work quickly and easily–our team likes to deploy features and changes multiple times per day. Rails provides skeleton code frameworks so we don't have to re-invent the wheel every time we want to add something simple like a sign in form or a picture upload feature.
If you are still not clear on what exactly Twitter does, take a look at this video by CommonCraft.
And how exactly is this relevant to libraries?
Michael Stephens from Tame The Web blog wroteabout using Twitter in a public library for internal communication
At the Skokie Public Library Twitter has become a nimble, extremely quick, and easy to use internal communication device. A small group of Skokie employees use Twitter to bounce ideas off one another, solve simple issues such as “how do I check something out to missing,” and even answer reference questions.
My guess is, that with time more libraries will turn to Twitter to facilitate the exchange of quick messages between staff members.
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