What’s that twittering I hear?

What can be said in 140 characters, the maximum length per message of the micro-blogging service Twitter?

The Gettysburg Address weighs in at about 1500 characters. The average hit song will top 1000 characters without breaking a sweat. Shakespeare’s 18^th sonnet comes in at 617 characters, so comparing anyone to a summer’s day is probably a no-go. The instructions on the back of a standard frozen pizza run to just over 400, so DiGiorno is hitting closer to the mark. A safer bet than the above, averaging somewhere in the 60-80 character range, is the knock-knock joke.

Twitter began three years ago as the reinvention of a podcasting company based out of San Francisco. Jack Dorsey was the first to suggest a messaging service that contacted groups via short message service, SMS, available over both cell phones and the Internet. After the hiccups of an infant technology or gadget, Twitter, Inc, was brought into the public eye in April 2007 and now has an estimated 3 million users talking about their daily lives in 140 characters or less.

And there is an active audience for it, “followers” who track a single person’s updates by cell phone and Web service constantly. President Barack Obama, the single most popular Twitter, has over 250,000 followers. CNN’s Breaking News Blog has the second place spot with almost 125,000 followers. But there is even an audience for the smaller Twitter-er.

Sara Amis, a graduate student in the University of Georgia’s English department, has 40 people following her Traveling Bobcat Poetry show.

“I try to capture the moment,” she says. “Whatever’s going through my head, whatever images or ideas, I try to compress into poetic form.”

She says her Twitter followers make the poetry into a performance art. Each twit she sends out they receive almost instantly, allowing them to “be there” at the moment of artistic conception.

Amis does not consider the 140-character limitation a bane to her creativity, and calls the micro-blog “a really good exercise in trying to say a lot in a small space.” She believes it forces writers a set of choices to make and actually forces an increase of creativity.

For others, the interest in Twitter is merely social.

“It’ll probably outlast my Facebook,” admits Julie Leung, a senior majoring in magazines at the University of Georgia. After updating on a daily basis – only once a day, she claims – for two months, Leung says that she feels like Twitter is more flexible than other social sites.

“I don’t feel constrained,” Leung says. She updates with minor notes or amusing tidbits she picks up. “I try to make it fun.”

The future of the micro-blogger is up in the air as newspapers, magazines and celebrities try to figure out where they can use Twitter to their advantage. For now, it’s open to experimentation: artistic, amusing, and otherwise.