Twittering or not twittering, that is the question

Much has been written on, about and around Twitter – with a clear acceleration over the past… three weeks ? Essentially the traffic on the site, and the number of mentions in the blogosphere seem to be highly correlated – which is not surprising since a lot of the Twitterati are also highly visible bloggers.

I had not paid much attention to Twitter during my 6–months blogging break, but discovered it two weeks ago when hanging out with my friends Scott Beale and Robert Scoble – who have been twittering away for some time. I jokingly told Scott that I would never use “that” but I did twitter quite a bit at Ted 2007, and since then.

What works for me with Twitter is the fact that I can fire one comment, one thought, one message, in 30 to 60 seconds. And not bother with presenting, formatting or developing that idea – because, or I should say thanks, to the 140 characters limit. I have always had difficulty at writing posts of less than 200 to 500 words, and so that artificial constraint is actually interesting. Obviously, the editorial value of these 140–character messages tend to “vary greatly”, and I would expect only a small number of close friends and/or associates to be interested in that “stream of consciousness”.

What struck me, or at least surprised me, what the speed at which Twitter got its mention in the New York times, was called the blogging killer, had its first mashups, and created a passionate debate between fans and opponents. Talking about mashups, Twittervision is really way cool, and could easily be applied to photostreams.

So it is something new and important happening in front of us, or is it a fad that will burn out that much faster ?

I say who cares? If it is truly useful to some people (like Tara “Miss Rogue” Hunt), it will find its (killer) application amongst other publishing and collaboration tools. And in the meantime I have added my own Twitter badge on this blog.

Disclosure: I have no interest in Obvious Corp, the makers of Twitter.

Comments

[Jean carl]

Really impressive buzz,

i am surprised.

[Assaf]

Twitter is about the short and the immediate. So no surprise that it quickly turns users into fans. There's some other reasons for that, but basically it's the other side of the short message constraint.

Is the service itself fad? Maybe. But all this buzz will amount to something useful. It will affect the way we build applications. Right now "mobile play" are solutions waiting for problems, or a bullet point on the PowerPoint presentation. Twitter will bring more people to play and experiment with scratch-an-itch mobile applications. 2007 will be a really interesting year for your cell phone.

[Wayne Smallman]

I'm now a keen twitter.

It's something I've yet to make fully available to my contacts, but I think there could well be a interesting angle in terms of clarifying my availability et cetera.

Even more so since I've signed up for the mobile messaging option, which might have been interesting yesterday while I was out at a photo shoot.

Also, I've integrated my Twitter feed into (what I'm reliably informed is) my 'lifestream', which is an amalgam of my feeds that I've knitted together using Yahoo! Pipes...

[Kim M. Bayne]

Twitter will become ubiquitous when it achieves critical mass and attracts independent innovation. Wait a minute! That trend is developing right now. Ha!

[Igor Jablokov]

"What works for me with Twitter is the fact that I can fire one comment, one thought, one message, in 30 to 60 seconds."

You must not value your time much...our platform contains a mobile front end that allows you to do that in 3-6 seconds... ;-)

Check it out: http://twitter.com/iggyyap

*Everything* in there was created using patent pending speech recognition...zero humans were hurt in the production of those posts (unlike Jott, SpinVox, etc.)...and they did not originate from a phone call...that's so last millennium. :-)