Twitter, at www.twitter.com, is a "microblogging" service: With it, users can post a sentence of no more than 140 characters. Other people read them. Really, it's that simple.

And it's proving, as the technological millwheel grinds forward, that information can be delivered in finer and finer parts, and, as in the case of the Airbus, more immediately than ever before.

It's one of those quirky little tools new media has brought us, which when originally conceived was frowned upon as a frippery, then gradually embraced, then for many of us became indispensable.

If you're older than 35, you may be wondering what I'm talking about.

Yeah, I know, I've been there, too; at 38 I'm crawling toward middle age. Although I have a hearty interest in all things tech, I'm stretched to find how the age of Web 2.0 can relate to journalism. I'm too Gen X, not enough Gen Y.

The whole thing loses something in the explanation. You have to do it to understand it. And as people do it, the potential of the service is revealed.

Twitter, in some regards, bears a striking resemblance to the telegraph's curt, pithy messages. Whereas cost forced telegraph messages to be short, Twitter's has a 140- character limit for "tweets" -- what individual Twitter posts are called. It's arbitrary in a universe of unlimited web space. Still, it teaches the requirement of brevity, of squeezing the maximum utility into the fewest number of words.

The telegraph changed journalism forever, forcing starker, less analytically verbose prose delivered en masse. News delivery became more objective.

Twitter, like the telegraph, has broadened choice. A good news tweet, like a good headline, will draw you in and make you want to read more.

It allows the industry to fulfill the Second and, come to think of it, Fourth, caveats of what I call "Cliff's Mandates for New News": "Tell it to me quickly," and "Deliver it the way I need it."

In some cases, Twitter replaces journalism as an arbiter between information and people, as in the case of Krums' Airbus tweet.

Twitter is having a democratizing effect on government participation. Take last year's presidential debates. My wife and I watched them on TV, but while we did, we had our laptop open at a Twitter site where other debate watchers could post tweets in real time, creating a flowing dialogue on what they were hearing as they heard it.

How's that for an exercise in democracy? By the end of the debate I had a sharply different -- and I would say more accurate -- take on the candidates' positions and performance than the pundits who hadn't heard the vox populi.

Samuel Morse glimpsed what would come in the first electrons stuttering from his new invention: "It would not be long ere the whole surface of this country would be channeled for those nerves which are to diffuse with the speed of thought, a knowledge of all that is occurring throughout the land; making in fact one neighborhood of the whole country."

Now imagine if legislators could see what people were tweeting during a Senate or House debate. Instant feedback. The change it could effect could be monumental.

Of course, information overload could paralyze an already grinding political process. The trade-off would be that more may be encouraged to take part in civic life. On the other hand, you can argue, this is the pin-top of a nation and media consumed by the sound bite.

OK, so I'm still vacillating on Twitter's usefulness.

To get a quick overview from some Frederick Twitter users on why they use the service, I sent out a tweet (Twitter users are designated by a username. Mine, for example, is @cgcumber, and that attribution is used here). Here are their responses:

n @bethschillaci: "Twitter allows me to connect with a wide variety of knowledgeable people that opens me to new opinions and ideas."

n @MammaMania: "Twitter helps me promote my blogs (MammaMania on the FNP) plus connect with other like minded business associates and it's fun!"

n @fredcochamber: "Twitter helps us engage in conversations with our members (& future members) that we might not otherwise be able to reach."

Whether you or I like it or not, and as mundane as most tweets can be, this may be a service with some legs. And who knows how this at first seemingly useless technology will be used in the future?

Twitter may even save journalism.

Clifford G. Cumber is an assistant city editor at The News-Post. He can be reached at 240-215-8606 or ccumber@newspost.com. You can follow his tweets at www.twitter.com, by following @cgcumber.