Twitterpating

I didn’t really get Twitter at first blush, but it’s growing on me. Maybe it’s just the welcoming glow of a young online community populated by cheerful early adopters, but there’s something wholesome about the site. It has the honesty of early blogging, when the idea of keeping a public record of your day-to-day life was still exciting.

We’ve since discovered that blogging is far too long a form for such mundanity, but Twitter’s 160 characters are the ideal length for terse, informative updates about one’s life. It’s the personal activity equivalent of del.icio.us. I want to see what my friends are finding on the web, but I don’t necessarily want to see a whole blog post about each link.

There are a couple of things that I think Twitter could benefit from:

• Integration with AIM status messages. Many of my friends use iChat or other IM clients that allow them to set their “available status”—that is, an “away message” without marking yourself as away. These status messages perform much the same function of Twitter, albeit without the sense of a timeline and other social aspects of the site. Only having to set my status once would be nice.


• Integration with Feedburner. I’d like to see Twitter updates mashed into friends’ combined blog + del.icio.us + Flickr ego feeds.

Those are both fairly particular uses for a service that’s surprisingly robust given its youth and refreshing single-mindedness. The site is really what you make of it once you’ve joined.

You can drop in on my twittering if you’re so inclined.