<p>Samuel Morse tapped out this historic message upon inventing the telegraph: What hath God wrought?<br /> <br /> 22 characters long.<br /> <br /> Alexander Graham Bell's first spoken words on a telephone: Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you.<br /> <br /> 41 characters.</p> <p>Neil Armstrong upon walking onto the moon: That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.<br /> <br /> 58 characters.<br /> <br /> Some of man's greatest breakthroughs have been announced in a handful of words, so perhaps the new form of "micro-blogging" called twitter, which limits all messages to 140 characters, is onto something.<br /> <br /> Launched a few years ago, twitter got a lot of attention during the recent political conventions with delegates, journalists and bloggers twittering away on their cell phones and laptops from the floor.<br /> <br /> The premise of twitter is that you're supposed to write about what you're doing "at that moment," which produced such posts as "Just saw <a href="http://www.baltimoresun.com/topic/entertainment/sean-penn-PECLB003397.topic" title="Sean Penn">Sean Penn</a> smoking outside the Brown Palace Hotel in Denver. He said he's in town for the convention."</p> Andrew Ratner, Baltimore Sun pop culture, digital, writing, consume, media, internet, web, 2.0, twitter, tweet, communication, text, message <p><strong><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/mrbill/" title="Link to mrbill's photostream"><strong>mrbill</strong></a></strong></p> the-feed 0 2008-09-23T09:57:10-04:00 <p>Looks like we're still on a <a href="/writing/birth-of-a" target="_self">nostalgic kick</a> from yesterday. Twitter might not be as catastrophically addictive as YouTube, but it has plenty of potential.</p> 2 2151 brevity-is-the-soul-of-new-communication-technologies 2008-09-23T09:57:17-04:00 true false true false false #<Image:0x2ada1afda3a8> 2008-09-25T16:27:10-04:00 http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bal-to.ratner23sep23,0,179270.column 371 262