Yostivanich

What is twit­ter, social im, web 2.0 irc chan­nel? In their own words “Twit­ter is a com­mu­nity of friends and strangers from around the world send­ing updates about moments in their lives.” The site basi­cally allows you to fol­low any per­son and their updates (which range from the mun­dane ‘walk­ing the dog’ to the more inter­est­ing “with all the life stream­ing going on, I’m won­der­ing if any­one is going to cre­ate con­tent any­more or just copy it all”). The inter­est­ing thing is that all posts are vis­i­ble to every­one else who is fol­low­ing you. This means that you can direct a con­ver­sa­tion to a wide fol­low­ing of people.

The more I think about the more the way I describe Twit­ter, Pownce, Jaiku, etc, is these are ser­vices that are a social IM. You can talk and micro-blog in a social man­ner. The recent Gnomedex Con­fer­ence had peo­ple talk­ing about the pre­sen­ta­tions on the stage rather than through IM and lim­it­ing their con­ver­sa­tion to just one per­son, through  Twit­ter (called twit­ter­ing) and dis­cussing it with every­one at the con­fer­ence and even those not at the conference.

It would how­ever not be right to call Twit­ter and is like minded ser­vices a Web 2.0 IRC Chan­nel, for one impor­tant rea­son, you know the peo­ple who are fol­low­ing you and who you are fol­low­ing. Now I don’t mean that in sense that you know them in per­son, the major­ity of peo­ple that I am fol­low­ing on Twit­ter I don’t know in per­son, but I know who they are. I choose who I will lis­ten to, who I will ignore, who I wish to include in my con­ver­sa­tion. This is a pow­er­ful fea­ture that dis­tin­guishes twit­ter from most open IRC chan­nels in that any­one can join and par­tic­i­pate in the con­ver­sa­tion with­out any say from any­one else.

The next thing is that twit­ter has a 140 char­ac­ter limit, forc­ing peo­ple to limit the amount that they say. Also twit­ter has a won­der­ful API that allows devel­op­ers to build off of it and cre­ate some cool new things. This adds momen­tum for those peo­ple who are most inter­ested in using new tools want to be able to play with and build onto it.

Twit­ter is best summed as a Social IM here in defined as — an instant mes­sag­ing plat­form that is open and allows the send­ing and receiv­ing of mes­sages to a com­mu­nity of peo­ple that choose to receive those mes­sages. I can’t find another def­i­n­i­tion of this else­where, and this is still a rough def­i­n­i­tion if some­one has a bet­ter idea of one leave a com­ment. Also tell me what you think of social im’ing. I’ll do a fol­low up of if it will gain trac­tion out­side of the small group of first adopters.

Pow­ered by ScribeFire.