The temptation is to write off Twitter as a blogging platform for the incontinent, and their cats. Evan Williams' new publishing system sets the threshold for an item even lower than his last great hit, Blogger, the web-based site which gave millions of people their first blog. It is the ease of publishing, though it encourages unthinking wittering, which explains Twitter's remarkable growth, particularly since the SXSW conference in March, when technology mavens adopted the easy-blogging service en masse. Quite how remarkable? Jason Kottke, husband of Blogger's other founder, plots the number of Twitter messages against Blogger posts at the same point in that earlier project's life. Twitter — because readers are constantly reminded about a friend's latest burble, and the cat's latest exploit — has taken off much more rapidly, as the chart shows.

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