Would you Twitter with me?

Seems like every early adopter in Silicon Valley is buzzing over the web 2.0 application Twitter. It allows you to let you friends and colleagues know what you are up to at any given time. You can communicate through instant messaging, sms, and their Web form.

Obvious Corp., the company who runs Twitter, has just announced that they are abandoning their property Odeo, so that they can focus on Twitter. Is this that big?

I haven’t actually seen any numbers on Twitter usage but I can’t imagine that they have tapped anyone but the early adopter crowd. I could never see my mom using Twitter…at least not yet!

What do you get out of Twitter? It is nice to know what is going on in the lives of my friends but I don’t think that I could ever see Twitter becoming so folded into the day to day aspects of my life… that I would use it to record every single event. Even right now, I go hour or days forgetting to update my Twitter account and I don’t feel bad about it. Experiences go by that I could have recorded but didn’t.

Some people have compared Twitter to away messages within instant messaging applications.  The thing is that away messages tell users when they are unable to chat.   Away messages serve a functional purpose.  What does Twitter do other then just proclaiming what your doing?   What is the functional purpose?  What do I get out of telling the masses when I have lunch?  It seems like Merlin Mann could be correct when he called Twitter “personality spam.”

Twitter is a GREAT mobile live-blogging platform. If I’m at an event and I want to report back what is going on, I can communicate with Twitter via SMS.  I can send short easy messages.  It is much easier then trying to edit a WordPress blog using Windows Mobile Internet Explorer.  It’d be cool if I could group Twitter messages to associate them with the bigger event that I’m reporting from.

Twitter is also a handy way to share a few links with some of your friends.

Godfather of CSS Eric Meyer seems to be grappling with the questions of Twitter.

Anil Dash also points out that Twitter has a better chance of long term success because it has opened itself to allow people to build ontop of it.  It may not be that Twitter in its current iteration is where it reaches mass market success.  It may take someone being really innovative with the platform before everyone starts using it.

Do you Twitter?

My URL is – http://twitter.com/thorpus