Tim O'Reilly Offers Twittering Tips

In today’s Santa Rosa Press Democrat story about Twittering, Tim O’Reilly offered some pithy and poetic insights to reporter Nathan Halverson on mini-blogging.

In fact, Twitter derives a lot of its value from forcing people to keep messages short, said Tim O’Reilly, chief executive officer of Sebastopol-based O’Reilly Media.

To make his point, O’Reilly quoted Alexander Pope, a poet famed for constraining his words into rhymed couplets. Pope once said that funneling his creativity through such a narrow aperture made it shoot out like water from a fountain.

O’Reilly is well known for his ability to identify Internet trends before they go mainstream, and Twitter is on that list.

“This idea of public, short messages is here to stay,” he said. “It is a new medium.”

Read the Press Democrat story here. (A free sign up may be required.)