I’d explain Twitter like this:

Take the status message of an IM client (like skype’s mood message) and scale that conceptually to a more public, permanent space, like the web.

That brings it to a place where a ’status’ or comment, if you will, might be relevant to more people. Twitter works great at a conference or other place where many of your contacts are congregated.

In a sense, I’m grateful that Twitter takes (or could take) a lot of the trivial stuff of the blogs. Heck, if you left for the airport, did a thing, and came back, I’d probably still be getting around to the blog post ‘at the airport’, something we’d see as buddies in an IM enviro.

As a long time IRC/chatter type person, I appreciate that the permanence on the web is like reading the scroll back in an IRC channel. I can be part of general chatter or not, or I can jump in and join the dialogue.

Tonight, I saw a failure in the chat workflow though. Someone’s simple comment in my friends’ twitter stream turned into a conversation, and it became hard to follow– not to mention the fact that people who are my buddies who aren’t buddies with whom I’m talking to, are seeing one side of the conversation.

I just started looking at Jaiku, since it seems to be between Twitter and a Blog program (not Tumblr, maybe a Wordpress lite perhaps?).. you can follow the thread of a post, so in a sense, it’s like a scaled down forum/blog hybrid thingy.

Twitter I believe speaks to two things: presence and small talk, nothing more. It’s also a controlled environment. That conversation is tied to authorized people somewhat– but I won’t get into that here, since there is a bigger convo to be had about complete challenge/response acceptance to a communication tool

One final note, just to clarify, since you linked to my blog post: I do _not_ think that Twitter and any of these cute gee-whiz apps could or should be used for anything mission critical anything. The fact that someone Twittered an earthquake 3 minutes before the USGS is a complete nonsensical and false hope. As hopefully one of my colleagues who has yet to post on the issue, none of these tools are going to matter one bit for those *affected* by a disaster. They are probably doing things more important like finding a loved one or making sure their house’s gas line is turned off, not checking their SMS messages. That is, if the infrastructure survives.

One dirty nuke and the EMP obliterates Web 2.0. No one wants to think about that.

Great post, sorry for blogging in your comment field.

I think I had a whole lot of comments, but then I read Eric Rice’s blog post in your comments, and thought he did a great job. Here’s a brief remix:

To me, Twitter IN is like a stream. I read it for flow. I want the pulse of the net, pulse of people I know or quasi-know. It’s a stream tool for data. I can bounce something into that stream and get some ripples back.

To me, Twitter OUT is a pointer. I can attempt to move the attention needle towards things I want to talk about, blog posts, videos, or things I like.

Father of two, as well. : )

[...] Okay, after railing against it previously, I remember the words of a wise man and decided I am in no position to bash on Twitter and claim to “not get it” if I don’t get off my ass and at least try it. [...]