2010.05.06
SINCE feudal days, subjects have hoped that petitioning the sovereign can have great effects. E-mail made writing to politicians easy. Now a new technology is making those missives public. Twitter messages (“tweets” in the jargon) are like public telegrams. No more than 140 characters in length, they can be sent from any computer or mobile phone. Anyone with an account (there are 100m and rising) can send a public message to anyone else by placing the @ sign before a username or a # sign before a topic.