Calling all Tweeps!

‘The second Tweetup of Sri Lankan Tweeps!’ blares the slogan for the event TweetupSL2, the second informal meet up of Sri Lankan Twitter followers to be held in Colombo at Dialog Future World and it is expected to draw a crowd of over 350 people this year.

The first Tweetup held in August last year at Coco Veranda, the venue sponsor of the event, started out in a most unceremonious yet predictable manner - with a Tweet - and the idea spread like wildfire amongst other Twitter users and finally amassed a crowd of over a 100 people on the day of the meet up. Quite the achievement as the event was in no way advertised and simply gained momentum through users ‘tweeting’ about it. Slated to be held on August 27 this year, it seems to be more organized this time around and with a growing Twitter community in Sri Lanka, is likely to attract a much larger crowd.

Twitter is an online social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, informally known as ‘tweets’ and is sometimes referred to as the ‘SMS of the Internet’. It has gained worldwide popularity rapidly and with 200 million users as of 2011, generating over 200 million tweets and handling over 1.6 billion search queries per day.

Twitter has also been ranked as the second most popular social networking site as of August 2011, with Facebook taking the top honours and LinkedIn coming in third.

Twitter meet ups or Tweetups are they are commonly called is an organised or impromptu gathering of people that use Twitter and they effectively take an otherwise great service like Twitter and turn it into something much bigger.