Tweet, Tweet: A Look at Twitter Journals

Don’t know if you’ve heard, but cell phones are not of the Zack Morris variety anymore.  Beyond that, they are not simply phones now, but little computers, TVs, maps, and appointment books.  Emerging from this cell-phone evolution is a new kind of literature.  There are several literary journals solely dedicated to publishing tweet-length fiction.  For those not especially Twitter savvy, that’s 140 characters or less.  Not 140 words mind you, characters.  Exactly how long is that? 
My story; first begins and tentatively sticks its head out into the world, takes an exploratory whiff, swivels, blinks and it ends likes so.
That long.  Not exactly Proust.
In some ways the whole thing seems to be a parlor trick, a ‘look at how much I can cram into such a small space’ exhibition.  Though sometimes these do come out haunting and beautiful, most of the time they are unfulfilling.  A story stripped down to bones. Definitely a beneficial writer’s exercise, to cut and squeeze and get right to the heart of it, but the question is, are these experiments worthy of sharing?  Is the tweet-length story a novelty or is it here to stay?
If you had one “legit” stamp to adhere to one of these twitter journals, you’d probably put it on Escarp.  The quality of their prose is generally high.  Some of the other journals hurt themselves by imposing genre restrictions on top of the already miniscule word count.  I stick up for horror and sci-fi when it is needed, but I think we all know, there’s a lot of garbage floating in those categories.   Escarp is the literary tweet journal standing among a crowd of pulp. 
Also a good bet for excellence is Nanoism.  There are some excellent pieces on there, mixed in with a fair share of duds.  They say they print “stories that fit into the cracks of your day.”
Tweet the meat is one of the aforementioned genre-specific tweet journals.  It is an all-horror publication with the catchiest name among its peers.  Murder and torture and zombies await you in bite-size pieces at Tweet the meat. 
Asking for and publishing near future, twitter-sized, prose poems is the journal Outshine.  Can’t get a lot more specific than that without requiring that stories must be set in Portland, Maine with all homosexual characters. 
Lastly, Thaumatrope is updated daily with stories in the sci-fi, fantasy and horror trifecta.  The best part about this journal is that they also include tweet-length reviews and interviews.  In that way, it is the most well-rounded reading experience of all of these. 
From the poignant to the mundane, the awe-inspiring and the groan-inducing, all of these journals have a wide range of writing to offer.  It is a reading experience like no other, snippets, plots lasting as long as sneezes. 
If it is indeed an experiment or fad that will pass, it will at least be entertaining for awhile.  If the tweet story catches on, these journals may be able to claim to have laid the foundation.  Are tweet-sized stories literature or horseplay?  Have a read and decide for yourself.  Stories of the smallest size, a multitude of choices, mutant sheep and drunk dialers await.