dreadedmonkeygod . net

Ok, as one who does not understand the appeal of MySpace (IRC-clone? Been there done that 13 years ago), what's the point of Twitter?

It seems to be a distribution list mechanism. You can drop messages into Twitter, and it'll forward the message to whoever's listening. So far, not that cool. Except, you can send that message a number of different ways: SMS, Web form, and via their API. And you can retrieve messages via RSS, API, SMS, whatever. That turns it into more than just a distro list. It's a message bus that humans and machines can pub/sub to. Might be really cool to use on vacation or weekend out to keep a group coordinated. Or maybe I have my home computers send messages when they have a problem. Better still: I can respond, telling my computers what to do about it. I can publish my daily goings-on to my blog, but who cares, really. What's interesting to me about this is that the actual interface is getting smaller and smaller. Blogger has a huge online toolset interface. Same with Amazon or any of the other innovative web development efforts. But Twitter is basically invisible, because all the interface stuff is on the back end. What makes this interesting to me is that rather than trying to drive traffic to Twitter.com, they're driving toward *integration*, and building a very low-friction message bus. I've been thinking for a long time that integrating well with others undermines customer lock-in, but propels your product to the center of any information flow. That seems to be happening for Twitter. There's a lot to be interested in here, and I think the folks that created Twitter understand where the Web is going really, really well. But this is all half-baked at the moment. I haven't really *used* Twitter, and I don't know anyone who does. I dunno. Sign up, and we'll see what happens?

Damn. I gotta implement some kind of formatting for comments...

Also, dude, you forgot the : in http:, so your link is busted. I'll fix it, but only this once, okay?

Ok, I've heard others talking about twitter, so I hopped on and added you. I'm at: http://twitter.com/ceeller/