Sociologically, twitter is very different from other communication forms. AIM and Skype are designed for communicating thoughts and ideas. Twitter, however, is designed for telecocooning. Telecocooning is traditionally defined as sending little "presence pokes" to people. For example, just saying hi or sending someone a picture of a heart or a smiley face. The point of these messages isn't the ideas they contain, but rather the message itself. That is, just getting any message from someone shows that the other person is thinking about them and cares about them.
Traditionally people telecocoon with their two or three closest friends. However, Twitter lowers the telecocooning barrier so you can telecocoon with many more friends for the same effort. People tend to just send messages like "ahh homework sucks" or "heh stuck at the library." You aren't really communicating anything intelligent, but you are building a feeling of group solidarity by letting people around you know what's up. It also helps people to find where their friends are if they want to meet up.
I'm not buying the telecocooning thing. Sounds like more of a catch phrase more than anything else. I can put up an away message that says whatever I'm doing much like a "presence poke". Or I can just blast a text to my friends letting them know what meaningless task I'm involved in at the moment.
I can see how it can show how you care or are thinking of them but if telecocooning lowers the barrier doesn't that trivialize a message? It's like giving a myspace bulletin to your whole friends list but telling them something less important than what is usually sent around.
I do like that you can use it to meet up with friends. That's a cool feature.
I believe telecocooning comes from Mizuko Ito's research, but Howard Rheingold cites it in Smart Mobs as well.
I think lowering the barriers does trivialize the message in some ways. For example, it would build less of a bond between any two individuals. However, I think it builds a tighter bond between the individual and their group of friends as a whole.
There is so much buzz around this company and I just don't get it. You can keep everyone up to date on what you do. Don't people already do this with AIM, Myspace, friendster, blogs, etc.? I just don't see a need to know if someone is listening to a Bono track right now. I'd like to get some feedback on some people who love the site.
there will be always place for new implementations because existing ones create gaps or cause a new wave of needs,
that takes force by users that are bored of something they already used.
if you accept that what we have available yesterday is enough for everyone today then you accept that there is
no space for new ideas.
but the reason there are ideas is because we are never satisfied.
though, i had also the same reaction when i first heared about netvibes broad use and I wondered why contrary to its simplicity. But its one of these times that simplicity of creating something not conceived by lots of people, can grasp significant usage due to the audience ready to adopt that peculiar experience, that later only becomes familiar and how i could live without it or just a trend that will pass...
Yeah I'm thinking it's mostly just buzz and the aftermath of SXSW. A friend did point out that it's good for if you're in the city and want to know if friends are somewhere close. This however does not apply to my 90s Zack Morris phone.
I compare it to those overly hyped bands that you only hear about either at SXSW or around awards shows. They never get a good record deal and fade away very quickly.
Really good marketing at SXSW. They had big screens in public places that scrolled random twitters. If you've ever stared at the scrolling Google search thing on Google's campus, you can understand the appeal.
P.S. is would be great if comments allowed some kind of wiki link syntax like [http://blah friendly name] :)