Ever since I created my Twitter account more than two years ago, I knew I either was going to use the service for a couple of months and let it die, or continue using it. Well, I'm still using it, only in a lot of different ways than before. I'll be writing more about that later on, nerd-stylee.

Twitter was created to let your friends/contacts/fans/the world/your mother know what you're doing in 140 characters (or less) per message, and to find out what those you're following are doing. That's still its purpose, nothing more. And despite my hard trying to get people to join back in the day, mostly trying to use the you'll-get-to-send-free-SMS!-carrot, not many joined. Very few of my friends saw anything useful in it. But when I found X ((Or rather, when she found me!)) , she was already using it! Oh, love.

I found it a challenge to write something in only 140 characters. I concatenated, found synonyms and even made up words and terms to get stuff through, especially when a bit tipsy and/or stressed. Twitter has even become a diary of sorts for me, as well as a thing to remember: don't write too much.

In the beginning of Twitter, only those with adequate technical skills could bend it enough to make something more out of it than twitter.com offered: using scripts, some created Twitter accounts that sent a new message once a new song was played on their radio station, like this. Others created more sophisticated scripts, some for finding interesting people/services to follow, some to download user picture to their address books while others spammed. Simultaneously, some user, somewhere, started tweeting to/about other users by @[username]. This soon became universal trade, and today you'll find most Twitter accounts filled not only with updates, but with mentions ((As Twitter recently renamed what previously was known as "replies".)) just like here.

Today Twitter has exploded. The number of users has increased with 1382% compared to last year, and it's nice to see the US congress got the idea to tweet as well, erhm.

Twitter has often been plagued with site-wide unavailability, forcing a lot of users to realise that yes, there's a reason why emergency phone numbers haven't been substituted for http://twitter.com/911. Despite this, Twitters is now up more than it used to be 1-2 years ago. Thankfully.

So how did Twitter reach the mainstream? Apart from the very viral effect, companies started using it. Twitter is a straight channel from user to follower, and as they released an API ages ago, there are plenty of other sites and services that have caught on to this. Salesforce, the biggest CRM supplier in the world, has integrated Twitter in their system. Blip.fm lets you write about an artist or a song, which is then Twittered. Brightkite lets you Tweet whenever you post a note or a picture about a geographic location. StockTwits lets you see stock quotes in near real-time. You can post your tweets onto your blog as a badge, let your tweets become your Facebook status, et cetera.

People like to combine - popularly known as "mash" - web services and let two or more of them become one. Twitter is no exception to this, and you can find a slew of them here. For instance, Track Twitter Now, a mix of Twitter and Google Maps lets you see where in the world trends appear, on a map.

Gossip rules, and where to catch it faster than from the horse's mouth? Celebrities update their every move and reach their target audience at once, concert arrangers immediately let their followers know when new artists are booked to play at their venue, companies give their followers special discounts on their products, not to mention the possibility for people to reply! Even governments and cities have caught onto this, faster than Chris and Rihanna go record a make-up duet.

And with extreme popularity, Sweden has started latching on; yes, even us. Several Swedish friends are merrily tweeting away and some have even started using applications to tweet. Wait, applications? Yes, there are other ways to tweet than using dear old http://twitter.com!

TweetDeck is an application that allows you not only to tweet, reply and see what your contacts are up to, but to create individual groups that you can sort your contacts into, and also create searches that are continually queried on Twitter for you. Sideline is an application from Yahoo! that only allows you to create and group custom queries by topics of interest. Twibblr is a client for S60-compliant mobile phones, Tweetie works for the iPhone, et cetera. Millions. But there are sites that can help you as well.

At first, Mobile Twitter was nice when it arrived, but now other, third-party services up the ante by providing extra functionality, e.g. Ginx which shows you where links point and keeps track of which links you've clicked. Twitterfall, my current fave for using Twitter, either lets you see tweeted topics of interest falling from top to bottom of the screen, and lets you tie the site with your Twitter account to unlock all the full features, letting you tweet, reply, favourite, et.c. Very clean and very customisable. It pushes tweets that match your searches/Twitter account onto the screen.

Now, Twitter has revealed what's depicted on the top of the screen: they call it their discovery engine which will let you enter searches at your Twitter home page and see the results of your searches trickle into your stream in real-time, together with your contacts' tweets, direct messages and mentions of you. Some competition for Twitterfall is good, mesays!

It'll be interesting to see the future of Twitter, this limited, yet quite imaginative and unlimited service.