matsu

Twitter

I’ve been using Twitter for the past few days. The concept behind it is simple but a bit hard to explain – it’s like an instant messaging nickname that you can update and receive updates from the people in your Twitter list, but it has several different quirks that make it more interesting. Their motto/slogan is “What are you doing?”, but there are a lot of possible different uses for it.

First off, it’s completely multi-modal – meaning that you can update it or receive updates by several different channels – on your phone through SMS messages, through your existing instant messaging account, through your web browser, or through a dedicated client (the system is open, anyone can interface with it – and for now it’s free and they are footing the bill for the SMS messages the system sends you). I like this multi-modality, meaning you can reach it and be reached (or not) in the way you choose.

As with any basic and open system, people have been using/hacking it in interesting ways, finding new ways to make it fun and/or useful. The basic usage is to give the world (if you have your account public, or just your friends if you have it marked private) a status of your situation, such as “stuck in traffic”, “eating lunch @ so an so”, or “taking crap from the pointy-haired boss again” – which gives rise to interaction, as people in your list may respond (either to the “ether”, or prefacing it with “@name” so everyone knows to whom the interaction is directed), giving it a feel of a big pub conversation (in which many times you’ll “hear” just the half of the conversation from the person on your list). Some people have also created identities that are fictional (like Darth Vader telling you what he’s doing and feeling ), or useful hacks (such as RSS news feeds that you receive like regular twitts). Another useful aspect of it, as the Twitts are archived in your account, is to record little ideas or phrases in the collective memory that you can look up later (and that you don’t mind other people finding out about, of course). Meg Pickard has written a nice summing up of Twitter as she sees it.

This makes Twitter not a messaging system as such, but more of an interface for very short messages, be it between people, or connecting us to machines (imagine getting your server status as twitts, as another example, something not very complicated to script). It will be bought by Google like everything else (it’s probably being indirectly financed by the money this guy made when Google bought Pyra Labs/Blogger). They’ve got a blog where you can keep up with their evolution.