Getting Twitter

It’s taken awhile. I’ve sort of “gotten” Twitter for awhile, but never really participated in any significant way. Tonight, I started getting into it a little more, taking a little more time to explore. I mean, there’s been enough whining by Winer, of all people, that you have to realize there’s some fundamental value there even if you don’t see it. Even if there is no business model, the core use case will get baked into the stack.

<long historical exploration of being considered out of it deleted due to excess of maudlin reminiscing about abusing online systems in a Twitter-like fashion twenty years ago>

Short version: Twitter is simply distilled Facebook on meth. It’s all about “following the people who you follow follow”. It’s like a time-machine into the blog posts of tomorrow, a drink from the firehose for those who can’t wait. Walk the chain of people who people whose memes you find essential to see whose memes they find essential.

Giles Bowkett says the firehose needs a filter to keep the piss out of your personal stream (a.k.a., the Tim Bray effect). I’m not that tuned in yet. It’s easy to initially weed out who to ignore, but harder to weed out who those you still follow care to follow that you wish to ignore.

If you think it’s simply social, maybe it is simply social for you. But it’s the collaborative potential that makes it sticky. On-the-fly collaborative neural rewiring. Short of communal telepathy, or ESP-inducing crack, I don’t see how you outflank this.