"140 characters" news and stories

Note: this post comes with a glossary.

"Twecipes¹" are the moment's micro-obsession and we ♥ the New York Times' Dining staff -- certainly active and useful Twitizens² themselves -- for flying into the eye of the storm in conjunction with today's profile of Twitter's marquee recipe condenser Maureen Evans, aka @cookbook. Still, must all prose now be condensed for optimal Tweetability³? Yup, it's been an addictively (though ADD) good time watching the 140-or-fewer-character Challenge responses stream into #nytrc⁴:

@betaphen Prep chokes w/lemon. Stuff w/zest, crumbs, parm, parsley, r-mary, garlic, carrot, capers. Roast in veg & liquid, covered @ 400 for 90

@rorycberger clean chokes stuff:lemzest/breadcrumbs/Parm/parsley/rosemary/garlic/carrot/capers/s&p. braise w/wine,carrot,onion,evoo @ 400 1.5 hr

We soundly applaud (and ever so slightly fear) their efforts, but our response was this:

@kittenwithawhip Sometimes the answer is just "Go here: http://bit.ly/bhf92" Not all recipes need be tweetable.

Perhaps it's terribly 2008 to think this way, but there's a near visceral joy in the reading of Melissa Clark's Stuffed Artichokes with Lemon Zest, Rosemary and Garlic recipe in its original form. The title alone (55 characters) vividly evokes the action and sensory experience of crafting, then savoring this dish in a way that spare, if technically correct Tweets can not. It makes for excellent editorial muscle flexing -- like a digital lipogram -- and it's an efficient way to circulate links, but we can't help but hope that Nigel Slater and his ilk of culinary poets never sign up for an @ handle.

Oh - and @pete_wells, serial tweets are for wusses.

1. Twecipe: 140 character recipe
2. Twitizen: Participant in the Twitter community
3. Tweetable: Expressible in a 140 character Tweet, or Twitter message
4. # : Hashtags are added in front of terms to make Tweets including them more easily searchable.

[via: New York Times Dining @nytimesdining on Twitter]

Many of you have, by now, heard of Twitter, the social networking tool used to post short messages to your friends about what you're doing at the moment. Loads of people use the service, and you can even follow Slashfood. But can you share a recipe in 140 characters or less (140 being the maximum amount of characters Twitter allows)?

Well, Cookbook sure thinks so. If you're on Twitter, you can follow Cookbook for regular recipe updates. For the most part, the recipes seem fine. In order to share a recipe in that number of characters, though, you've got to use as many shortcuts as possible, and that does make some of the recipes hard to follow, in my opinion.

Overall, though, it's a pretty neat concept. It's kind of like the Cartoon Kitchen on Serious Eats, only it's delivered right to you. What a way to bring cooking into the 21st century.