@ LJSreaders This will be much longer than 140 characters #ev.

Evan Williams, the co-founder and CEO of the white-hot microblogging site Twitter.com and the guy who made BusinessWeek's 2008 list of the 25 most influential people on the Web, returned to his home state of Nebraska on Friday to visit his dad in Clarks.

And while he was here, he stopped by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, which he attended through his sophomore year, to chat with dozens of students, staff, faculty and community members about his insanely popular social networking site.

In true Web 2.0 spirit, attendees could submit questions to Williams in person or via a Twitter feed.

Subjects of discourse ranged from the technical to the ethical to the trivial, as Williams conversed with crowds in Kauffman and Andersen halls, giving pretty frank answers all the way through.

On the user-generated explosion of Twitter, Williams said, "You want to feel like you have a certain amount of control over what you created, and you want to guide it a certain way. But it's more powerful if you kind of have a loose grasp on it.

"We don't dictate where Twitter's going," he said. "We don't even know for sure."

In the spirit of brevity, here's a summation of Williams' observations, in tweet format, of course:

* Ev on Twitter: "It's very easy to trivialize it, and in a lot of ways it is trivial, but it's also profound."

* Williams doesn't know how Twitter, which launched in 2006, is going to make money yet, but it will.

* Shaquille O'Neal's an awesome tweeter. Who would have thunk it?

* 1 of Twitter's greatest virtues is a power of constraint. Ev: "The constraint broke down the pressure to be profound."

* Williams' wife is his favorite person to follow on Twitter.

* Twitter and Facebook are different enough that they can co-exist in the future.

* The users themselves are the heart and soul and backbone of Twitter.com.

* Twitter parodies of Christopher Walken=funny. Twitter impersonators of Christopher Walken=wrong.

* Advertising in its traditional form is dying. Newspapers are hurting. Journalism is not.

@ev And a piece of advice, a final tweet of the day, Mr. Williams?"Follow your gut and change the world."

Reach Micah Mertes at 473-7395 or mmertes@journalstar.com or http://twitter.com/micahmertes.