Penn wants you to know something.
Several things, actually - 448 since this March.
Penn is one of hundreds of colleges discovering the possibilities of Twitter, a microblogging Web site.
Earlier this year, the University added Twitter to its flock of social media portals, allowing students, alumni and faculty easy access to campus events via www.twitter.com/uofpenn.
Twitter is a Web site where users post short - up to 140 characters - messages called "tweets," which offer distilled versions of status updates made popular by social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook.
Penn's Twitter site is run by the Office of University Communications and serves as a hub for information about trends and events around campus. Several student groups have their own pages, and the University "re-tweets" many of their stories.
"There's a lot of waste in traditional ways of communication," said Lori Doyle, vice president of University Communications and administrator of Penn's Twitter account. "A few years ago, we'd have to put stories in to news outlets, but now alumni can see research and events online."
Twitter provides a more intimate way for administrators to connect with students. "Get your thinking cap back on for the first day," Penn tweeted last Wednesday.
Students can also sign up for live text-message score updates from The Daily Pennsylvanian sports section, keep current with leading research, view photos of New Student Orientation and more.
Joining older sites like Facebook, iTunes U, YouTube, and Flickr, Penn's Twitter site celebrated its 6-month anniversary earlier this month and hasn't shown any signs of age.
Penn consistently posts an average of three or four "tweets" every day. As of press time, 1,426 people were following Penn's Twitter updates. This number is the 6th highest among the Ivies - all of which also follow this growing trend - led by Brown's 3,245.
At the beginning of 2008, Twitter was the Internet's 3,000th most visited site, according to traffic metrics site www.alexa.com. Myspace.com was 8th, and Facebook was 9th. Today, Twitter ranks 13th, following closely behind Google India and MySpace.
College Twitter usage has been a fairly recent trend - while Twitter went public in 2006, its popularity has been growing quickly, as businesses and celebrities realize the site's potential for connecting to fans and customers. President Barack Obama was a regular user of Twitter during the 2008 election, and attributed part of his campaign's success to the power of social media.
According to Doyle, Penn's Twitter is targeted at prospective students, alumni and "people who have some familiarity with Penn."
"I feel we've been very successful," she said. "We get more fans every day."
Ivy League Twitter pages
Brown: @brownuniversity
Columbia: @Columbiaup
Cornell: @Cornell_Univ
Dartmouth:
Harvard: @harvard
Penn: @UofPenn
Princeton: @princeton
Yale: @yale
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