Witty tweets captured in 'Twitter Wit' book

"The tweets are irreverent, inappropriate, geeky, and pretty much hilarious," Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said in a message at the firm's website. "If you don't like one, you'll like the next."

Author Nick Douglas got permission to publish a collection of tweets that the book touts as "Brilliance in 140 Characters Or Less."

Tweets in the book include: "The baggage carousel sounds a lot more fun than it really is."

Twitter is not getting any money from the book's publisher, according to Stone, who wrote a foreword for the work.

"The first few pages of Twitter Wit provided an opportunity to share some behind the scenes perspective and highlight the significance of humor as a meaningful part of communication," Stone said.

Twitter allows users to pepper one another with messages of 140 characters or less and has seen a dizzying surge in popularity since it was launched in August 2006. The micro-blogging service claims millions of users worldwide.

Twitter has launched a contest that challenges people to create brief videos showing interpretations of five tweets plucked from the book's pages.

Contest tweets include:

"Why should I be the one to take the kids to see their psychologist? I don't even love them" and "Why aren't martini glasses shaped so they don't spill so easily on the bus?"

The book launched with a list price of 12.99 dollars, but online shop Amazon on Wednesday was selling new copies for 9.55 dollars and used copies for a couple of dollars less.

Predictably, readers whose tweets were quoted in the book praised the work while Twitter users whose missives didn't make it into print were more critical.

"I can't wait to see what offensive thing I said about your mom got published in this book," one person quipped in a review chat forum at Amazon.com.

(c) 2009 AFP