The Hyperconnected

We're addicted to data, and new inventions like Twitter and the iPhone will only make it worse

Illustration by Harry Campbell for TIME

One early front runner for the title of the "YouTube of 2007" is a service called Twitter. Twitter enables you to broadcast to the world at large, via the Web or phone or instant message, tiny snippets of personal information: what you're doing, what you're about to do, what you just did, what your cat just did and so on. Twitter does the Internet equivalent of splitting the atom. It creates a unit of content even smaller and more trivial than the individual blog entry. Expect the response to be suitably explosive.

There's something delightfully self-deprecating about that name, Twitter--we're all...

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