Twitter Co-creator Dom Sagolla to publish “140 Characters: A Style Guide for the Short Form.”

Printed by John Wiley & Sons, the book is scheduled to appear in bookstores in the US and Canada on 10/19/09. The product of four years of research and writing, this field manual to social media has three major features:

1. The definitive history of Twitter, from an insider’s point of view
2. New grammar rules for short-form writing, and a catalog of writing styles
3. Inspiring quotations from comedy to poetry from some of the best writers, including the Twitter creators

Three ways to think about 140 Characters:

• The equivalent of Strunk and White’s Elements of Style for today’s social media & marketing messages
• A handbook to help you develop your own unique short-form writing style with simplicity, honesty, and humor
• The authoritative approach to Twitter, written by its creators to include other social networks like pure text messaging

For marketers and business owners, social media is an increasingly important avenue for promoting a business-this is the first writing guide specifically dedicated to communicating with the succinctness and clarity that the Internet age demands.

140 Characters is a much-needed guide to the kind of communication that can make or break a reputation online. Appearing alongside the printed edition, an abridged Hypertext Edition will also be published specifically for iPhone by DollarApp in San Francisco. For more information please visit http://www.140characters.com.

Press Inquiries

• press@140characters.com (Dom & Wiley PR) – 415.287.7775 (Dom)
• Book Jacket Art
• Author’s Photograph
• Author’s Biography

Book Premiere

Tuesday October 20, 2009
7:00pm
BookShop West Portal
80 West Portal Ave.
San Francisco, California 94127

Press & Blog Coverage of 140 Characters

• Teknision: Celebrate the Short Form (08/20/09)
• La Informacion: Casi 300 páginas… para aprender a twittear en 140 caracteres (08/19/09)
• Haraka Haraka Haina Baraka: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Tweetie (08/14/09)
• Christian Science Monitor: Sued for a tweet: How not to deal with complaints on Twitter (08/01/09)
• [video] YouTube: @dom on ‘140 Characters’ (08/01/09)
• Wall Street Journal: ‘Twitterature’ to Hit the Bookstores (06/24/09)
• [audio] Strange Love Live: Live from Bar Camp! (05/03/09)
• Christian Science Monitor: Oprah tweets, Twitter arrives (04/17/09)
• [audio] @ThePodcast: Interview with Dom Sagolla, The Guy Who Helped Create Twitter (04/08/09)
• [audio] Westwood One Radio: Twitter Turns Three (03/21/09)
• [video] Nightline: Sign of the Times (02/26/09)
• New York Times: Anatomy of a Tweet: Twitter Gets a Style Guide (02/13/09)

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.