Twitter–a service that lets you broadcast and receive short messages within your social network–is blowing up at SXSW this week.

According to Valleywag, the site normally carries around 20 thousand messages a day, but broke the 60 thousand a day barrier this weekend. One reason for this is the fact that prominent flat screens on the the fourth floor of the Austin Convention Center are showcasing the site to the technorati, which not only encourages its use in Austin, but spreads the meme across the bloatosphere.

Pete Cashmore of Mashable reveals just how big Twitter is in this hilarious diagram:

Karoli at DrumsNWhistles offers an alternate view.

Every time I see someone tittering about Twitter I have to do a reality check. What is it about this thing that has so many otherwise intelligent folks all googly-eyed? If I didn’t know better, I’d think there was a geek-wide conspiracy to make us like this stupid, timewasting, useless black hole of an application whether we want to or not.

I observed the various uses people found for Twitter before jumping into the fray myself. Most people use Twitter to make microblog posts that answer the question, “What are you doing?”. But I like to see more creative uses for the service, like MJ’s. She uses the 140 character limit to write haikus.