Posted on April 4, 2007 at 10:59 AM in @earthlink
Note: The below is an archived entry from Earthling, formerly EarthLink's official blog. The blog itself has been decommissioned and is no longer updated, and comments are trackbacks are no longer accepted.
This morning EarthLink is pleased to announce that Arlington County, VA, has selected us to build, own, and operate their 26 square-mile Wi-Fi network. There's more information in the press release, and less information in our new EarthLink Twitter presence, ELNK.
What's Twitter and why would you want this?
We'll be publishing "get to the point" versions of our press releases via the free services provided by Twitter.com. One way to think about Twitter is "Microblogging". Every piece you publish is limited to 140 characters or less, and the intent of the system is to provide status updates that answer "what are you doing right now?" So our Corporate Communications folks will be giving you updates about what EarthLink is doing right now, whenever we have something interesting to share. One neat thing about Twitter is that you can receive it any number of ways -- by looking at it via a web browser or through RSS, or if you sign up to get a free account at twitter.com, you can also receive it (and send to it) via instant messenger or SMS from your cellphone. There are also desktop applications and widgets you can use.
Even though it's in wide circulation in some circles and may already seem like old hat to geeks, at just over a year old it's still pretty new. So if this sounds weird and foreign to you, don't panic. None of our other ways of communicating are going away, this is just a new thing we're adding for those who might find it useful. Rafe Needleman from CNet and Webware, who I had the pleasure of meeting at SXSW this year, has written an excellent guide to Twitter for newbies. If this sounds like something you might be interested in, I urge you to check it out.
So why would you want to get our news stuff via Twitter? Maybe you want to keep up with what's going on around here, but don't want to read through entire press releases. Maybe you like bite-sized content written in a way that gets right to the point. Or maybe you just like Twitter and are increasingly learning about what the world is up to that way.