New technologies and ideas like Twitter have a habit of appearing completely useless at first, and then suddenly catching on. I remember the first time I saw the ICQ "pager" on the internet in the mid 90's. My thought was "WTF is this stupid thing good for?", now (like most people) I have multiple IM accounts and do a good bit of my daily communications via IM.

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).