I think that Twitter is IM to the world, just like blogging is emailing to the world.

Many other things could be dubbed as “IM to the world”. Gregor’s delicious feed, for example. Or Phil’s stylefeed. Twitter removes the context (bookmarks, objects to buy) and cranks the social knob to 11.

(here Twitter is superior to blogs because you get a very precise map of your subscribers, which is much harder to do with blogs)

I suspect (which is the reason why I don’t use it) that Twitter is as addictive as any good IRC channel… and as pointless as they feel when you look at them for too short of a time span.

Case in point: searching in your IM/IRC logs makes very little sense after the fact (unless you’re looking for something specific, say a URL). Yet I know that information changed my life: I married a girl that I first met over email and IM and several of the people at my wedding were people that I keep in touch via IM routinely.

If this is not the best example of global value being much higher of the individual granular values I don’t know what is.

Looking at a single twitter message is missing the forest for the tree. Is judging the performance of a ballerina by the pictures on the newspaper. The value is in the altered state that condenses after the observation and participation in the data flow.

Yet, I don’t use it. I have a twitter account, but I have not used it once ever.

I don’t use it not because I think it’s crap (or the concept is wrong/useless) but because I’m afraid I’m not capable of coping with yet another disruption of my focus budget and fear that might push me over the edge and “default” (aka drastically reduce not only my productivity but my perception of productivity which is even worse)

The biggest problem with Twitter (or with any other observation that tries to focus on the individual message other than the discourse or the result of the process) is that its ROI is really hard to estimate: what will you get if you start using it? will it be worth the effort?

It’s much easier to understand if you like an artist by watching a few paintings of hers than understanding if you like a movie director by a few shots of her movie (because the painting is a complete object, while the shots are not).

These ‘dynamic’ technologies require more effort than those technologies that do the ‘dynamic -> static’ filtering for you. It’s easier to trust Britannica than Wikipedia, or the New York Times‘ article on a natural disaster over a selection of blog posts over the subject written by affected people…. but this is also like watching a trailer for a movie and avoid watching the whole thing because “we don’t have time to do all this processing ourselves”.

Or reading a transcript of an episode of “This American Life” instead of listening to one hour podcast (if you ever listened to more than 10 episodes, you would know how horrifying that thought sounds).

Reading the transcript of an IRC chat, for example, shows no evidence of the comradely or bonding-making exercise that most often goes on… timing is what’s missing. Pauses. Bursts. Tones.

And sometimes, it’s too much too: I remember when ICQ used to relay every keystroke to the other side in real time… you would watch the other person type, correct her mistakes, go back, decide not to tell you something or rephrase it. It was too much, too emotional, which is one of the reasons I stopped using that mode in ICQ.

In short, not all technology (old or new) is good for you, but participatory dynamic-oriented technologies cannot be evaluated by removing their primary characteristic without coming up with a (frankly) statistically insignificant subjective value.