I'm not a patent attorney, but to me, they seem to be completely different than what Twitter does:

http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/7130389/claims.html http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/7362852/claims.html http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/7418085/claims.html

It seems their technology is more push, that is, one person submits a message and their software will then broadcast it via email, SMS, phone, etc, and will even translate the message to a target language. Twitter is pull; it doesn't push. Other third parties might do the pushing, but Twitter, nope.

Also, the last two patents seem to be more business related, applying the first patent to schools and government organizations, which to me, is a painfully obvious use of the first patent (and in my world, the other two would not have been issued, but we're not on my world).

I agree, although I'm not a patent lawyer either.

The first claims of each of those patents states that there must be "user selected priority information that indicates a contact order for the user contact device" and that there should be "a priority order for contacting each user contact device within the group". Twitter doesn't do that, and all the other claims rely on the first.

It doesn't matter what I think. It matters what the judge thinks. And having been a part of a couple of patent processes, you are encouraged to make your claims as broad as possible.