Thanks for sharing — I find that a clear and accessible description of a very practical approach to Twitter.

As I think about this more, I realize that many of the cognitive speedbumps I have with Twitter have to do with its characteristics. I can see the tremendous benefit of self-organizing groups of people engaging in (near?) real-time exchanges, but why limit to 140 characters? Why is everything public? I haven’t seen (but maybe there is) a “status” display that let’s you know if someone is on-line or not, etc.

It seems to me that tools that deliver this same kind of community-building have been around since the Usenet days (my lawn…), and what we’re seeing is the waxing and waning of the popularity of social software gadgets that have sprung from the minds of the latest batch of propeller heads — and that popularity is based on many other things beside practicality and features.

So here’s a hypothetical question: if you could build a new social software piece that you knew would reach the same level of popularity as Twitter, would it look much like Twitter? What features would the ultimate social software include?