How Twitter Changed The World

A few years ago, what you were doing was essentially known only by yourself, your family, and your closest friends. A stranger in Dubai didn’t know you were on the way to Whole Foods to pick up something organic for dinner and he didn’t care. Today, there very well may be hundreds of people worldwide waiting to see what your next move of the day will be - that is, of course, assuming that you’re addicted to Twitter.

When I’d thought of creating a similar service to Twitter several years ago, I decided that people probably wouldn’t want everyone aware of where they were, who they were with, and what they were doing for every second of the day. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Today, the status service is up and running on virtually everything with a keyboard and, with the introduction of its recent iPhone counterparts, it shouldn’t be long before Twitter trumps its already high user count in excess of one million as of this writing.

Though most of the world isn’t yet addicted to Twitter, similar services like Loopt and Whrrl are adding GPS into the mix to deliver an even more in-depth look at what their users are up to. While the services present a number of pressing security concerns, they deliver something that is quickly changing the way that people live their lives. If you’re in a mall by yourself and suddenly the desire for Sushi strikes you, your phone can tell you which of your friends are nearby and in seconds you can be sitting with them face-to-face at the hottest Sushi bar in town.