To wit

I have no idea what the likely longevity of Twitter is—these days technologies catch fire and disappear pretty rapidly. But you have to marvel at the ecosystem that has sprung up around the Twitter phenomenon, the clever riffs on the name that others have created, what all this has meant for the Twitter brand. Can you think of another brand that has generated so much slang so quickly?

Twitt
Twittering
Tweet
TweetDeck
Tweet2Tweet
Tweetie
Twitt(url)y
TwitterBerry
Twitt’m
Twitterati
TwitPic
Twitter Bites
Twitter Bug (and other stuff from Urban Dictionary, including Twitterverse)
– and countless others

I think my favorite so far is

…which has something to do with tracking opinions on Twitter. Just looking at it with all those t’s and r’s stacked together sets up a tuning-fork kind of hum in my brain. I gaze at it for a few seconds, doing stuff like trying to say it backwards. And we worried about all those years about making names simple, and unmistakable in terms of pronunciation. Goes to show what you can get away with when you’re slipstreaming behind a massive buzz machine. (Sorry, you cannot get away with Twitxr.)

There’s something else in here about the intersection of technology and language, especially at this moment, but I’m not feeling philosophical enough today to digg into it.