Tiny messages pop up on a world map every few seconds in an oddly absorbing babble of nonsequiturs from all over the planet. And that’s it.

Welcome to twittervision.com, a supremely unnecessary concept that is becoming the biggest craze on the internet.

In London yesterday someone was “digesting felafel; anticipating beer”. Moments later a message arrived from Texas: “Having a hard time staying awake. Making another tea run.” In India an anonymous voice cried out: “I want to tell someone my true feelings for her, but afraid she’ll reject me”.

The effect is hypnotic: 24 hours a day, bulletins from unconnected lives are released from every corner of the world for public consumption. “Twittering” began last year, when Jack Dorsey launched twitter. com, a website that allows its users to let each other know what they are doing, through text messages or the internet. Users are asked: “What are you doing?” The answer, or “tweet”, is sent to other users.

According to the site Twitterholic, the Top 10 twitterers have thousands of followers. Seventh yesterday was John Edwards, the US presidential candidate, who has been sending out campaign updates on Twitter. This week Time magazine said Twitter was an “early front-runner for the title of the ‘YouTube of 2007’”.