First of I just want to say how all this angst over the value of what is nothing more than a 140 character way of showing a very small part of cyberspace that you still have a pulse and that your fingers can still work a keyboard is humorous at the least but also indicative of how absorbed we can be in our own self-importance that we think we need to be friends with everyone; and that they need to know our every thought.

It doesn’t matter whether we think what we say is important or not we just have to get it out there for everyone to read. Sure we couch our reasons why it’s important with cutesy catch phrases like social this and social that, or it’s the new way to network, or it how I stay in touch with the important people, or …. well you get the idea. We always can come up with perfect reasoning’s for everything we do and the popularity of Twitter is no different - it’s just new, cool and makes you feel like you’re one of the early adopters.

Here’s a hint - Twitter stopped being the land of early adopters about two weeks after SXSW where it first burst on the scene getting the attention of people like Robert Scoble, Jason Calacanis and the rest of the top tier of the blogging A-List. Even though bloggers like ParisLemon worry about when it hits true pop appeal it’s too late it already has. The day the first clone appears the path to popularity is already laid and it is no different with Twitter. Just because the AOL’er types look at you strange when you say the word Twitter doesn’t mean that it isn’t mainstream.

After all when a single post by some-one like Jeremiah Owyang can cause a new term like Twitter Tuesday (meaning an large influx of new users and friend requests in a single day) to be coined you have to realize that you are knocking on the door to the mainstream. As Brian Solis points out on PR 2.0:

There’s no doubting its numbers though. For the right topic, Twitter is an incredible source of traffic.

The migration to shorter conversation bursts (140 characters or less on Twitter) is evolutionary and is also indicative of our insatiable appetite for both media snacking and also a sense of community. On any given day, I see more response in Twitter or Facebook than I do on PR 2.0 or bub.blicio.us. But that doesn’t mean that blogs are slowing down. It just represents that people share and discover things differently.

This isn’t just applying to bloggers or early adopters as even myself in my limited popularity have seen more than my fair share of friend requests coming in that don’t have a homepage or blog URL attached; which in my mind says that Twitter is now in the land of the regular internet user.

However this popularity is a definite double edge sword for as much as we hear people giving Twitter praise we are also beginning to hear even more voices decrying its usefulness mainly I think because of its very rise in popularity.

Whether it be Scott Karp’s long diatribe or Rob Hyndman’s short one liner Twitter’s very rise in popularity and increasing use by real internet users is giving some some pause about their continued use of the service. In his post Scott comes right out and calls Twitter nothing but a massive waste of time; which had Anne Truitt Zelenka come out with full guns a blazing about how she found Scott’s post insulting. For the larger part of her post I agree with what Anne had to say in response to Scott’s post and while I wouldn’t go to the point of calling Scott’s post insulting I do think she is right when she says:

I don’t understand why people have to go beyond saying “this didn’t work for me” to slamming the people for whom a tool does work:

And there is the exact crutch of the problem with using Twitter - especially if you are using it a method of increasing the reach of your brand. While many look upon Twitter itself as the tool it is in fact nothing more than a service. The key is how you interact with that service. For many people their only interaction is through the Twitter website; which in my personal opinion is one of the worst ways to use the service if you are serious about using the Twitter service.

As with any interaction with any service it is all about the tools you use to communicate with the service. So while Scott may feel inundated with the uselessness of the service my response would be - what tools are you using to interact with it?

I remember when I first started using Twitter back at the point when it was still part of the whole early adopter scene and I hated the web UI. That was the whole reason I wrote TwitBox in the first place. then as Twitter grew in popularity and its signal to noise ratio increased I felt a need to be able to have some way to make things I wanted to know about to stand out from the rest of the messages. This is why I added a feature to be able to have different background colors for messages based on keywords.

Then came a suggestion from within the the Twitter community from people like Chris Messina, Stowe Boyd and Brian Solis for a way to create and follow conversations which is how the idea of #hashtags came about. As I saw this as another way to further refine ways to get my attention for things I was interested I added support for the idea as well.

The point is here that you can’t blame; or get frustrated, with a service for becoming popular. What you can do is blame yourself for not finding the right tools to make the service useful to yourself and if the developer of your favorite app for using the Twitter service won’t make your experience of interacting with the service more useful then find one that will.

The Twitter service is actually a pretty incredible service and can be of a lot of benefit which contrary to what Scott might think will only increase as the service continues to grow. That said I can also see how intimidating it can be when you see message after message scrolling by. That doesn’t make it any less useful though. It just means you need better tools to be able to make the service work for you - not the other way around.

Listening to: Tiesto - Magik 2 - Story Of The Fall (Mixed By DJ Tiesto)

Conversation Tags: Twitter, social conversation, TwitBox