Akademik

n.

A real world meeting between two or more people who know each other through the online Twitter service.

Twitter has been taken up so exuberantly by the connected community that it's now used by the MTV Music Video Awards, presidential candidate John Edwards, and even some news organizations and fire departments to communicate their urgent messages. Its own vocabulary has even emerged: As mentioned earlier, a Twitter post is called a "tweet," and "tweetups" have taken place where "tweeps" have met up in the real world for social gatherings. You can find a glossary of Twitter terminology at the Twitter Fan Wiki: http://twitter.pbwiki.com/.

—Michael Muchmore, "Twitter," PC Magazine, October 15, 2007

People keep coming, conversations are perpetually on, someone leaves, and someone else joins in. You chat with your friends and acquaintances regularly and ever so often you also meet one of their friends. You join into their conversations and make new friends in the process. Someone you didn't know earlier reaches out to connect; you do the same when you want to reach out. This café is virtual, but the people are real and they do meet up often — at work, at parties, at Tweetups (offline group meets of Tweople, as Twitter users are called).

—Rajesh Lalwani, "Micro-blogging, anyone?," Hindustan Times, May 7, 2008

This is a blog entry that was inspired by a face-to-face meeting between two bloggers who connected via Twitter. What would you call that? A Twittermeet? A Tweetup? Cast your vote in the comment section.

—Scott Monty, " Be the Ball, Danny: http://www.scottmonty.com/2007/03/be-ball-danny.html," The Social Media Marketing Blog, March 21, 2007

I added microblogging: http://wordspy.com/words/microblogging.asp ("posting short thoughts and ideas to a personal blog, particularly by using instant messaging software or a cell phone") about a year ago (June 7, 2007). Then, as now, the major buzz in the microblogging space (as the venture capitalists would say) centers around Twitter: http://twitter.com, a site that combines social networking: http://wordspy.com/words/socialnetworking.asp and microblogging. (Thank your deity of choice that they didn't stick with the original name: twttr.) Twitter operates by periodically asking members a simple question: "What are you doing?" Members respond via instant messaging, short message service (SMS), third-party programs, or the Twitter site with text-based posts — called tweets — no more than 140 characters long. (When Twitter won an award at the 2007 South by Southwest festival, their acceptance speech was apropos: "We'd like to thank you in 140 characters or less. And we just did!")

If you'd like to follow Word Spy on Twitter, see twitter.com/wordspy: http://www.twitter.com/wordspy. For my own personal twitter feed, check out twitter.com/paulmcf: http://www.twitter.com/paulmcf.