If you haven't taken a stance on the raging Twitter debate, don't feel bad. The free, fledgling Web service counts only around 80,000 subscribers. And while Twitter has been around for a year, things didn't start heating up until early March. Since then, bloggers have debated whether Twitter represents a leap forward in online communication--or the faint, first chirps of an attention apocalypse.
Twitter is a twist on instant messaging. It lets subscribers send short updates about their every move and thought to the cell phones and personalized Web sites of groups of folks, rather than just to individuals. When it was launched a year ago by Obvious Corp., a startup formed by blogging technology pioneer Evan Williams, the idea was to offer a simple service people could use to send text message updates to the cell phones of their friends.
