Twitter turns five: will it rule?

Work on the social-messaging service Twitter began exactly five years ago today. Now it has some 200 million registered user accounts, but that's only about 10 per cent of internet users, and even less if you take out the spam bots and inactive accounts. Will Twitter ever become a universal service?

I'm already one of the heaviest users of Twitter in Australia, and on Patch Monday this week I'm joined by three more.

Kate Carruthers (Twitter handle @kcarruthers) works on many aspects of social computing and the future of technology and business. Twitter has become her standard way of "connecting to the matrix".

Open-source software advocate and developer Jeff Waugh (@jdub) is developing a web-based Twitter client called Denby, and has some thoughts on Twitter's recent announcement that it was changing the rules for accessing its API.

And James Purser (@purserj) is from Collaborynth, a consultancy that develops collaboration tools for business, government and not-for-profits. For him, Twitter has become a standard part of communicating with his clients and peers.

There's also my usual look at some of last week's news headlines.

To leave an audio comment on the program, Skype to stilgherrian, or phone Sydney 02 8011 3733.

Running time: 34 minutes, 06 seconds