Twitter

I've been playing with Twitter since it first came out a few months back. I too thought it was useless, and really only signed up and invited my wife because I wanted to demonstrate how geeky I was (she doesn't know yet).

Suddenly, almost immediately, something strange happened. I was leaving little "messages" for my wife on twitter, and she was leaving messages for me as well. It turns out that during the day, she's busy with her life, and I'm busy with mine. We're rarely both at our computers at the same time long enough to hook up with instant messaging. We kept missing each other with the "Are you there?" message and no response. Yet, throughout the day there are little things we want to communicate with each other about, but that are not important enough to justify the overhead of an email, and certainly not a blog post.

Twitter fills the (small) gap between email/blogs and IM. Simple as that. It can be asynchronous like email, and at the same time "instant" like IM.

I don't know if Twitter will be productive/useful in the long run. But the fact is that it's useful to some people in some contexts right now. Suddenly, a lot of people are using it. And that means it probably has a future.