Monday, April 21, 2008

Twitter is Something New

I'm not the first one to discover this but it took me a few attempts before really understanding why Twitter.com is a game changer.

Twitter is known as a micro-blog tool, which isn't interesting in the least.  You could always limit yourself to 140 characters without a service.  What Twitter is not, is a way to update your life-status (i.e. I'm getting lunch ready).

For me, Twitter is a chatting room tool to converse with only people you are interested in.  In many ways, Twitter combines the usefulness of IRC and IM with Facebook's social web.  When you let Twitter pull your addressbook for a list of current contacts already using Twitter you may or may not find close friends showing up.  For me, I was pleasently suprised to find a bunch of people who I've corresponded only once or just happened to be subscribed to the same email list-serv.  These were all people that I have something in common, however insignificant.

Twitter allows people to follow or not follow people with very little barriers.  If someone you follow just irritates you, you can remove the offending person without affecting anyone else.

Facebook is set to launch an Instant Messaging service.  Unfortunately, they haven't realized that Twitter beat them to it.  I can't imagine Facebook having a better system.  Facebook would be better off just buying Twitter for whatever obscene price Twitter is willing to make a deal.   Twitter also needs to somehow be combined with Quoteably.com -- either by Facebook buying both companies and merging the teams or by Twitter offering to buy Quoteably.com so that they get the same talent on their team.

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