Twitter has an interesting problem: they sell it as service to tell people "what are you doing", explicitly pushing the "hyper-connected" angle. This was great for early adopters, but normal people don't care about the idea of being "hyper-connected" and being informed every time their friends fart.

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.