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"In the beginning was a word, sketched on a legal pad. And the word was Status.\nThat was the working title used by programmer Jack Dorsey in 2000, when he designed the service that was to become Twitter six years later. An urban-design geek, Dorsey envisaged a city full of people buzzing short messages at each other the way taxi dispatchers and bike messengers do. Where are you? What's up? What's your status?\nToday, five years after its inception, Twitter's status seems in flux. On the one hand, it is a vibrant virtual metropolis beyond Dorsey's wildest imaginings. It has garnered 200 million citizens from every corner of the world, yet manages to be more orderly and simple than that noisy Facebook megalopolis down the road. There are no annoying Mafia Wars notifications here, no targeted ads, no anxiety-producing friend requests \u2014 nothing but real-time messages from whomever you're interested in, be they Lady Gaga or the girl next door.\nOn the other hand, all is not well in Status City. This week's cover story in Fortune warns that Twitter usage appears to be flatlining. One hundred million of those citizens are absent altogether, and Twitter.com has fewer visitors per month \u2014 about 20 million \u2014 than MySpace, according to comScore. The company has a steady hand on the tiller in new CEO Dick Costolo but lacks a visionary product leader (Dorsey is equally focused on his next company, Square). It still suffers from irritating outages and isn't turning a profit.\nAnd as CNN reported on Wednesday, UberMedia, the company behind mobile Twitter apps like Echofon, is planning to build a rival microblogging network, one that may shun the famous 140-character limit. So are the buzzards circling over Status City? Should tweeters head for the hills or prepare to move to a competing town with fewer regulations?\nIn a word: no. The city that Jack built is a lot more robust \u2014 and unrepeatable \u2014 than it may seem.\n"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2011/04/15/twitters-status-robust/>