It may have been the celebrity gossip headline that alleged Jennifer Aniston broke up with singer John Mayer because he was spending all his time on Twitter.
Or maybe it was the MSNBC story about someone whose Twittering may have cost him employment after he wrote: "Cisco just offered me a job! Now I have to weigh the utility of a fatty paycheck against the daily commute to San Jose and hating the work."
Or possibly it was the photos a smiling, bandaged Lance Armstrong couldn't wait to post on Twitter after busting his collarbone during a nasty spill from his bicycle.
All of that buzz within a few days last week made me wonder: When did Twitter take over the universe? Or put another way, when did a Web service that transmits messages of 140 characters or less, that apparently makes no money and is used by 3 percent of the U.S. population (and probably less than that) become the greatest thing since mint chocolate chip ice cream?
Don't get me wrong. I like Twitter. It has evolved into a fascinating stew of the macro and the micro - real-time news from around the world and small-scale chatter from around the block. It's one of the more useful toys on the Internet. And at least for now, it's free.
But it's one of those technologies that mystifies people even as they become addicted to it, sort of in the way that people began calling their BlackBerry their "crackberry," acknowledging their unnatural obsession for it.
"More people are hearing about it than actually using it," Nicholas Carlson, an editor for the Web site Silicon Alley Insider, said of Twitter. "A lot of people using it are professional media who already love to talk for a living. We had CNBC on yesterday, and we counted and they said 'Twitter' 24 times. The media used to say, 'If it bleeds, it leads.' Now if it tweets, it leads."
In his blog post "100 Things More Popular Than Twitter," Carlson included Niagara Falls, AARP's magazine and the summer TV filler America's Got Talent. In fact, "Catwoman the movie was even more popular than Twitter," Carlson noted. It's been estimated that Twitter has 7 million users, although Twitter does not release its usage figures.
As Twitter continues to grow at a rapid pace, its duel identity as both cultural obsession and national punch line was brilliantly captured by a cartoon clip made for Current TV, the tech-savvy channel started by Al Gore and others several years ago.
