1. I’m explaining to my administration why people should be using it at my university.
2. no. it doesn’t.
3. no.
4. I’ll try and explain anything to anyone if they’ve asked me to… I’m not particularly interested in proselitysing.

Glad I helped prompt you to write about this! It is a great piece, and it is always useful to see someone else’s perspective. As I was reading this, it reminded me of the role analysis piece of Folksonomological Reification (http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback-book/folksonomological-reification/6043166) which I wrote a while back. You advocate clarity in choice of roles when using Twitter – which I think is good, but I am not sure I have put that much cognitive effort into it.

I haven’t pruned my Twitter network at all yet. I choose to follow people either because I have seen the other end of conversations with them or because they follow me. I then get curious enough to look at what they have to say for themselves, and if I like it I follow them. Like you, though, ‘if I like it’ doesn’t mean ‘if they agree with me’ – I follow people who will stretch my understanding and give me insights into areas where I am weak (most!). Without deliberately designing my Tweeple to be one, I am building my personal learning network – people who help me understand the world better, who make me think. Maybe one day I will have enough people attracting my attention that I will have to see about some un-following.

I think a strength of Twitter, over, say IRC, is that it is a global space. Because it isn’t fragmented, it allows dynamic communities to spring up. Whilst walled gardens have their purpose (protecting fragile flowers while they develop, either horticulturally or academically) a global space also has benefits.

The thing that makes twitter a ‘not a status’ kind of place (that’s what i use skype for) is that I don’t want to ‘be available’ for everyone on twitter all the time. I participate as I have time. This seems to work well.

When i need to write something more concrete than 140 characters I write here on this blog. (or I call someone) the 140 characters forces people to refine their ideas to a point. I find that helpful.

As for designing a better one? In a sense I’m trying that at the university with the laconica project… which offers more of a common ground and isn’t proprietary. I’m not sure what ‘better’ would look like, maybe the combination of the twelve things i use… but i like the fact that i can keep my networks a little separated. It’d be fun to sit around and fight about though

for me the software comes after the network… I’ll always choose bad software with good people, might sound weird… but i can’t always predict what people will use.

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?