I was having a conversation this weekend with my wife about Twitter. She is way more technical than the "average" wife, but doesn't really "socialize" online much (her IM client has only me as a contact). Anyway, I was trying to explain Twitter to her, and some of my summary points were:

1) Twitter is the evolution beyond IM, which was the evolution beyond email. 2) Twitter is (likely) best suited for 1-way status updates (I'm at X, doing Y) to close groups of friends vs. "micro-blogging" which seems (to me) like "micro-attention-whoring" most of the time. 3) Twitter is useful when you don't need or want a response, just a way to keep friends/family in the loop about things where the value decays over time (ie: you wouldn't post your vacation summary via Twitter, but you might mention that you landed safely at the airport) 4) Twitter took a new approach, trying to embrace some of the Web2.0 methods, where it's NOT a closed client-server system as IM is. Instead it seems more like a framework that is waiting for the true killer app to be built around it (or, some might say a solution looking for a problem).

Funnily enough though, normal people will care about what Twitter really is: a general-purpose platform-agnostic publish-and-subscribe messaging system. Or as mainstream users will initially see it: a simple way to text & IM all your friends in one go.

If Twitter wants to grow big in the mainstream, I think they would do well to completely change their public sales pitch to focus on this. Once this is sucessfully communicated to the average user it will become huge, and people will quickly and instinctively grasp the usefulness of platform agnostic pub/sub.

I don't really get the self-absorbed stream-of-minutia thing.

One of the goofiest messages I saw was something along the lines of, "I'm at a bar with a hot chick, having a drink."

I'm sure that went well.

Twitter seems to be more for "Announcing" rather than communicating.

Maybe I'm just not well connected enough, but I really doubt anyone in the world cares what I'm currently doing day to day. The people that do care, I communicate with via more appropriate methods.

For me, I don't think it's an issue of who's a geek and who's not, it's more "who's going to leave their AIM or ICQ protocols to use something on the web that does the exact same thing?".

a) Past statuses get archived. Each of them gets a permalink. You get RSS on them. There's a huge difference between just seeing what someone's doing right now, and being able to see a concise summary of their day or days laid out before you.

b) You can access it via mobile phones.

c) It is a social network. You can discover interesting people by clicking around.

d) You can follow others. This one is so huge I'm certain I still haven't grasped all of its implications. Twitter is a social network built on a single simple one-way connection, and already there's more value flowing through it than through facebook.

When I go to facebook I get spammed and poked and bitten and humped and god knows what else. Facebook is made for senders. When I go to twitter I can get a sense of what my close friends and family are up to, no matter where on earth they are, so that when I do open up my IM window to chat with them I don't have to start with the tedious "how was your day?" I have prebuilt objects to begin a conversation with. Twitter is built for recipients.

twitter scales more at the edges.

Forget mode, protocols, technology. I can be mobile with a phone, send a message not only to another phone but as data that can be further processed by machine or other people.

Longer text is better for some writers - they don't have to work to fit in their message. But it's better for all readers - they can come read their twitters knowing no single entry will swamp it.

People who do not spend most of their time in front of a computer will call their friends directly, rather than checking Twitter.

Only the stereotypical geek sees an advantage in non-personal communication about personal matters.

That sentence is phrased for maximum humour, but with a kernel of deep insight:

a) If your mom was in the same room as you you would talk far more often with her than you do now. The easier you make something the more frequently it will happen. The more context y'all share about each other the more often y'all will talk to each other. And it's super hard to share context when you're far away from -- and out of sync with -- each other.

b) When you're face to face a lot of time you say things to each other where the only response is a grunt. That doesn't seem to be appropriate in IM or over the phone. The result: we're more careful what we say over the phone or IM. But if you can stop self-selecting what seems worth talking about you can find far more interesting conversation.

c) Just like not everything deserves a response, not everything deserves a response right now. If I know what is going on with my mother I'll have better conversation when I do talk to her. And it's better to lay the groundwork for it now, before we start talking.

d) We've had online communication for 10 years now, and it hasn't really cannibalized real-world interactions for the vast majority of us. What it has done is enriched and complemented them. In this case, twitter doesn't replace conversation, but it allows me to sidestep the tedious initial "how was your day, dear?" segways and head straight for the most juicy objects of conversation from somebody's timeline.

Conversation happens off twitter, but benefits from being rooted in it. This isn't purely synchronous IM or phone, nor is it purely asynchronous email. It's just a more organic way to manage conversation.

I think when social aggregations catch on more people will be more free to choose whatever medium of expression they choose and be assured that they are communicating with the people they want to communicate with.In fact, I really see a need for the "Sharers" if you will to be able to create their own outbound social feeds that aggregate the many forms of self-expression a single person may want to partake in.