Twitter: Are you an innie or an outie?

  Apparently Silicon Valley is all a flutter about Twitter. A phenomenon that I was completely oblivious to until Thursday March 23, 2007, when presenters at  Blogher Business 07 casually mentioned it in a way you would mention something like "the sky is blue, or "Americans work too hard."

In other words, if you are part of social media then of course you know about Twitter. Disclaimer: You may not reach the twitter site when you click on that link. I didn't. Even at 5:00 a.m. central.Evidently twitticts can't get enough of it. Twitter is an online superstar. Think cable's nonstop coverage of Anna Nicole Smith. Think the paparazzi obsession with all things Angelina Jolie.

So what is Twitter and what does it have to do with business? When asked that question, folks at the Blogher Conference couldn't exactly explain it,and that says proponents is just fine. Blogger Jason Kottke says Twitter reminds him of blogging circa 2000.

The reaction to Twitter mirrors the initial reaction to weblogs...the same tired "this is going to ruin the web" and "who cares what you ate for dinner" arguments. Also like blogs, everyone has their own unique definition of what Twitter is (stripped down blogs, public IM, Dodgeball++, etc.), and to some extent, everyone is correct. Maybe that's when you know how you've got a winner: when people use it like mad but can't fully explain the appeal of it to others. See also: weblogs, Flickr.

In a post called What is TwitThis? Mondomendeusah writes,

global community of friends and strangers answering one simple question: What are you doing? Answer on your phone, IM, or right here on the web!

TwitThis is an easy way for people to send Twitter messages about your blog post or website. When visitors to your website click on the TwitThis button or link, it takes the URL of the webpage and creates a shorter URL using TinyURL. Then visitors can send this shortened URL and a description of the web page to all of their friends on Twitter. more

 

  That certainly wouldn't explain The Twitter addiction for most people. But here's the thing. You only have 140 characters to work with. That's it. 140. When you tell me that, I get the addiction. In December, Kathy Sierra at Creating Passionate Users wrote about the The Twitter Curve,

We've all been at the brain bandwidth breaking point for the last five years. Email is out of control. IM'ing sucks up half the day. And how can we not read our RSS feeds, post to our blogs, and check our stats? If my Cingular cell phone sends me a MySpace alert and I'm not there to get it, do I exist? But email, IMs, social networking, and blogs are nothing compared to the thing that may finally cause time as we know it to cease. I'm talking, of course, about Twitter.

This is a wonderful post that talks about being in flow, becoming an expert,and being able to focus. As she writes,

I'm making fun of Twitter, but this isn't really a funny topic. Moore's law for the brain doesn't quite work. We're evolving much, much, much too slowly... Brain 2.0 isn't coming anytime soon.

And yet...she writes,

[UPDATE: Against my will, I found myself reading the Twitter timeline again after I posted this (I told you it was addicting) and had just about the biggest laugh of the week when I found people Twittering about... this post on Twittering. ; ) I love you guys (Sarah and Arabella you made my night!) And I can think of dozens of reasons why Twitter is a wonderful thing (like for separated families, etc.) But talk about an event horizon... Twitter is the new Crackberry.]

Chris Garrett is also not a convert. As he writes in My Twitter Experience.

While it is fun, I don’t know how anyone can get any work done while it is on. Far too distracting. For those who say it is the next big thing? Not convinced. I haven’t seen a single worthwhile message, not a single scoop, not any content of note that I couldn’t get through another channel with more context and depth. I’ll keep one eye on progress but if I want to chat with friends I will do it through Skype and IM.

My own Twitter experiment will have to wait for another day. It's now 6:30 a.m. and Twitter is still not responding. I can't spend all day acting like twitterdom and twitterdee.

This is cross-posted at Blogher