What's Twitter For?

The biggest question I hear about Twitter is "how long will it last?" And it's certainly true the the ability send very short messages that can be read by anyone in the world seems only mildly more useful than reading a bunch of random short messages sent by everybody in the world. This article though, points out that there are times when putting a message in a bottle and tossing it onto everyone's front yard can be useful.

This all ties into something I've been saying for a while. People like to share themselves--what they are doing, what they are thinking, where they are. A lot of folks who aren't really wired online (or who have hefty offline lives) claim they don't want to do this with a bunch of random people. And to a certain extent that's true of everyone, but you don't really get that choice--there's no good way online to distinguish between those who are interested in what you do and say and those who aren't. Close friends are easy, but casual friends are much harder. That's different when all your contacts are in physical proximity. Then you can read their reactions, or tell by how many times you all get together. But when everyone's remote, you need some other mechanism. The easiest way to deal with it is to just put the info out there and see who responds. And in that sense (as he alludes to elsewhere in the article), posting on Twitter is no different than posting on a blog. You throw stuff out and let your friends self-select.

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