I enjoyed speaking with Henry Tenenbaum on Sunday morning.

I see the future following the model of the past, which is: we started out with this SMS application.

Thank you, @HenryTen and @KRON4News for a great experience!

Have you watched the video demonstration of Google Wave yet?

What we have here is shrinkage: shorter times to update, shorter updates themselves, by word in translation, or by character in live typing.

Any time we see an acceleration of realtime transmission like this, we witness a revolution. With the telegram, then email, texting, instant messaging, Twitter, and now multi-party live typing and translation.

So much more of which we have not yet dreamed awaits us.

The 140 character limit shaped Twitter and the short format. The limitations of this new “cursor presence” will shape Google Wave and the carrier signals that follow.

When you are typing in a Wave and your cohorts can see every action, the lessons of 140 characters matter even more. Your skills as a writer using Facebook and Twitter will shine in this new medium. Google Wave exposes your abilities even more clearly, and even helps you learn via playback, automation, and live translation.

Twitter is elemental.

Google Wave is atomic.

Be ready to learn from this new mode of writing and collaborating, and bid adieu to email as we know it. Nothing can really replace Twitter at this point, but we may soon have the perfect companion.

For the skeptics: watch to see if the experience degrades gracefully across devices. Consider Twitter or your service of choice to be your platform, the board that carries you across this wave. Don’t let go, but get ready for a wild ride.

I was lucky enough to be available for this Nightline piece on Twitter. I spoke for about half an hour with the irascible John Donvan, which got boiled down to about 30 seconds about our book (starting around 5:22 in the above clip):

[Dom skateboarding]

John Donvan: He’s writing a book about his Twitter experiences, in which he argues that having to say something in just 140 characters — that’s a new kind of literature.

“Your ability to express yourself is pretty laid bare, and I’ve struggled really hard with a style that is both expressive, but also unique and recognizable out of context.”

Peep the full video featuring Biz and Ev, thoughtfully captured by Adam.

They’re no Strunk and White, but Dom Sagolla and Adam Jackson are aiming to do for Twitter what “The Elements of Style” did for good writing on paper: outline elementary rules of usage, composition and grammar.

Thus begins an article on our book in the Bits & Blogs section of the New York Times. From her summary, what impresses me most about Ms. Wortham is that she understands how Twitter users are collectively creating a new genre of literature.  One of the best parts of this article is in the comments, however:

Does anyone see the irony in a *book* about how to write for Twitter?

Yes, BarbaraKB we do, and what delicious irony it is. Our “book” will be in hypertext first as an iPhone App, and then later published in print. During the entire process we hope to add the latest feedback from the community and stay as fresh and current as we can.

This is going to be a challenge, but we’re committed to staying relevant.

Prelude.

oh this is going to be addictive

@Dom, March 21, 2006

Twitter is born, and Dom posts the first substantive tweet in response to a message from Twitter’s inventor: @Jack.  Mastering the short form becomes a daily study for Dom. Four months later, we launch “twttr”.

It takes a year to master Twitter, and another 9 months to write the first 10 Rules. That brings us to December 2007. In February of 2008 Jack writes his famous quote, and in March Dom buys 140characters.com to help change the world.

The meeting of Dom and Adam.

July 11, 2008: iPhone 3G Launch day. Liana, a sponsor of iPhoneDevCamp, introduces Adam to Dom. We talk about Twitter and Adam’s recent move to San Francisco and of course grab the first iPhone 3G models to leave the store.

August 3: iPhoneDevCamp 2. Adam runs into Dom outside of Tommy’s Tequila and describes his idea for a Twitter book. Dom describes a similar ambition. Over margaritas, we decide to become co-authors and self-publish our work together.

@TheBook is born.

August 28: Starbucks on Townsend. We discuss chapters, format, and a timeline. We begin collecting thoughts on our wiki.

September 2: Podango in the Dogpatch. We discuss the current literary offerings on Twitter, and how to differentiate ourselves. We were to meet up a few times in October, including FlashCamp.

November 13: Starbucks on Townsend. Dom comes to Adam with an epiphany about how to differentiate ourselves: become a literary guidebook. Have an opinion about style and focus on that. We decide that our two totally different approaches to posting on Twitter will make good stylistic crosshairs.

November 17: Starbucks on 4th Street. We launch the site: 140 Characters, and @TheBook on Twitter.

“One could change the world with one hundred and forty characters.”

Fast forward to now, with you reading this post and contributing to the book!  This is our story, and it’s only just begun.

Welcome to 140 Characters, the hub of our combined efforts to write, edit, publish and distribute a book about Twitter. Updates on our work, excerpts from the book and exclusive short form content will be published here by Dom & Adam. We’re not alone though. When we say, “our combined efforts” we’re talking about the community as well. Every tweet is a contribution to this book. The Book on Twitter has been created by you and is a collection of information collected by Adam and Dom over the last 3 years using Twitter, tens of thousands of tweets. Thank you for visiting and we are pleased to have you here. Subscribe to the RSS feed and stick around. This is going to be a wild ride!

Hi. My name is Adam Jackson. I was born in Central Florida in 1986. In my 22 years on this planet, I’ve driven a tractor trailer professionally, operated a tractor, acted as The Assistant Manager at an Apple Store, Configured my high school’s wireless network and LAN infrastructure, worked on enterprise server systems for SMBs and dabbled in photography / graphic design. I moved to San Francisco in June of 2008 and began my career as a social media marketer. I’ve broadcasted my life 24/7 from a webcam on my head and sent 31,500 tweets to Twitter in just 18 months. My passion for Twitter is from the heart. The service has changed the way I live life and has enabled many opportunities for me. 31 thousand tweets has allowed for some amazing exploration on how the human mind thinks and responds to small bits of text. I’ve mastered the tweet and I want to share that with you. Twitter is a service that can work for you in many ways but my contribution to the book should help answer some questions and help you get started.

——-

Hi. My name is Dom Sagolla, age 34.  I’ve been writing since before the advent of blogs over at Dom.net. I was working at Odeo with Jack when he invented Twitter and got to help it grow. Being user number 9 on a system of millions of real people has been an incredible experience that I want to share with everyone. I believe that Twitter represents the world’s fastest, easiest way to produce hypertext, on top of an ubiquitous platform who’s power is yet untapped. Also, I’m pretty fanatical about grammar and style so this book should be the perfect outlet for me.

My company DollarApp will be providing the iPhone design and development services for our app.  I think this type of small-form content is perfect for the one dollar price point.

We’re really excited to announce this project today — it’s been a long time coming.  Thanks for joining us!

While I was at the Sarasota International Design Summit,

of course I posted to Twitter about it. Local one-man news crew David Leonard caught my message and visited the conference in order to interview me. Here is the article (corrections in italics), originally posted to the 10Connects site:

Sarasota, Florida – Dom Sagolla knows the value of a dollar. The founder and developer of DollarApp is creating applications for the iPhone that are just a buck.

“It’s like they say, ‘I’d buy that for a dollar,’” the 34-year-old designer said. Dom is just one of many speakers who gathered for the 2008 Sarasota International Design Summit hosted by Ringling College at the Ritz Carlton Hotel. Designers from Google, Microsoft, Herman Miller, and others presented work and discussed the direction of social networking in the real world, online and from mobile devices.

It was one of those events that were under most people’s radar. I found out about it on Twitter. I put in a search on robots within a 50 mile radius of Tampa and caught Dom’s post.

“Checking into the Ritz-Carlton in Sarasota, Florida — turns out this Design Summit is high class.”

It turns out Dom was one of the originators of Twitter; #8 in fact.

“Jack Dorsey envisioned twitter as a messaging service to keep people in touch where ever they were in short bursts and stay connected and share ideas,” said Sagolla who is #8 of more than a million subscribers to Twitter.

“There are almost genres of users who tweet what they are eating next or what they thought of what they ate or what their cat is doing. I am more of a journalist.”

It was fun talking with David, who is doing a great service to the Tampa Bay area, and it’s always fun to turn other journalists on to Twitter.

From the Twitter FAQ:

We like to keep it short and sweet! It also just so happens that 140 characters is the perfect length for sending status updates via text message. The standard text message length in most places is 160 characters per message. We reserve 20 characters for people’s names, and the other 140 are all yours!

See also the origin of the 160 character limit for mobile messaging.

This is a collaborative effort.  If you’ve invented a stylistic convention, feel free to share it by posting with the tag “oneforty” or by writing to us at: style@140characters.com.