I agree with all your points about community, dipping in and out and collaboration. I suppose I was just looking to focus on the structural things about Twitter that enables these things but wholeheartedly agree that it is how real people than embrace and use these tools that is what it is ulimately all about. I need to spend longer getting to grips with Wave and when I have a spare hour and 20 will watch the vid on your blog.

Cheers Adam

Like Dave says, it’s not about the platform, it’s about the medium. We’re communicating in a brilliant new way that’s both in real-time and archived, and anyone can join in, whether to contribute or just observe. I bloody love it :>)

But i think its popularity is far more basic than this, its to do with community and society. Of course people use social networks for different reasons, some simply want to hang with the cool kids, others like the attention, or it could be the peer praise, the status of having more followers that your friends or you may you genuinely just like to help people out.

But twitter is different to most social networks, for a start with most social networks you know most of your friends in the real world before letting them into your network, with twitter the opposite applies most users didn’t know the followers before finding them on twitter. Because of the way twitter works you can quickly find, like minded people regardless to who there age, background, location and participate in conversations with them.

You very quickly become connected to many different circles of friends of link those communities forming super communities, which means that information travels very quickly, in ways that have never been seen before, you get the news before it can even be reported on tv.

Once you’ve been going a while, your likely to have followers from around the world not just where you live,this means that whenever you go on line your likely to be able to talk to someone online – it may be 4 in the morning where you are its 2pm somewhere in the world.

Also on the time issue, because twitter conversations are open collaborative conversations, they are collaborative and participatory, so you often find yourself being drawn into them.

In someways twitter is a bit like the coffee bar in friends or your local bar, you can just pop any time of the day or night have a quick chat and to catch up with friends and if you need a bit of advice there’s sure to be someone there that can help you out.

Then there is the structure, it incredibly open, and people often post very personal experiences, again this makes bonds with those people incredibly strong.

Then there is the technical stuff, it is open, so people are free to create fun ways to manipulate the data like the snow maps, or the emotion steams, it is also structure (all be it informally people using hash tags) this means its easy to manipulate and can be incorporated into searches, blog, discussions etc.

As an application Twitter is yet to make money, and it may well be replaced by something else, possibly something based on the new google wave technology, but as a concept this sort of lite open social network is probably going to grow from strength to strength.

Sorry this ended up being a very long comment and not a very structured one at that, but its sort of the nature of titter, it babbles on and on in the background going this way and that an occasionally you find a truely serendipitous conversation. (Adam feel free to edit it down before posting)

Ps. Thanks for the name drop Dan, and Adam for linking to my new(ish)blog . Hope to continue the conversation over a beer some time soon.

I was out running with Dave Coxon yesterday and he was telling me all about the latest craic in search. I just asked stupid questions and wished I knew what he was talking about… Sounds like some big changes are coming though! Thanks for the Foremski link, I’ll keep an eye out.

I blogged a while back about crowdsourcing info on Twitter, and how it’s much more reliable than search engines when looking for recommendations on products or services. It helps us connect directly to each other, and cut out the influence of the middle man. I think you blogged a few weeks ago on how Google is a heavily-biased algorithm and not people, and this is going to be an important distinction in the future of search.

I suppose we’ve already had this through Technorati and other blog search engines in the past, but I think Twitter has a much more powerful search capability – probably due to the speed, permission and relevance factors – and it’s going to get better.

But all this comes at a cost – which is the time and effort it takes to build a network organically, and develop relationships with your followers. There aren’t really any shortcuts to this, and I think this is one of Twitter’s greatest virtues.