This weekend for just £1 India Knight Where am I The boxer Kenny Egan had just weighed in at 80.8kg for the semi-final of
the national senior championships in Dublin. Ciaran Cuffe, a Green TD, is calling for the resignation of Sammy Wilson, Northern Ireland’s environment minister. Graham Linehan, one of the creators of Father Ted, is shuffling around his local park “like a cow that’s just learned to walk on his hind legs”. Last Friday was just another day on Twitter, Ireland’s fastest-growing social networking website, where users recount the minutiae of their daily routine, from the life-changing to the mundane. The micro-blogging website, which has been dubbed the new Facebook, attracted 1,610 new Irish users in the first six weeks of the year, according to irishblogs.ie. A total of 7,939 Irish twitterers are now publicly chronicling their lives, 140 characters at a time, slowly pushing the site from cult to mainstream status.
It is similar to other social networking sites such as Bebo and MySpace but has surged in popularity because of its immediacy and convenience, users say. Twitterers, as they are known, exchange news in real-time, via the internet, e-mail or by text via 3G phones.