Cote of RedMonk twitters that Gillmor is blogging at eWeek. This is good, but interestingly, he’s chasing the Twitter thing as I have been for the past couple weeks, rethinking my initial skepticism thanks to the convenience of twhirl on the desktop.
NewsGang
Today’s brainstorm is Twitter. When it first surfaced I circled it like a bear does a baby seal – not quite looking at it, not believing it could be such an easy target, having no idea whatsoever of its apparent or eventual usefulness. But something about this stupid 140-character limit and haughty self-promotional beacon in the cybernight gave off an eery glow, the faint hint of what is coming. Twitter, when combined with such obscure hacks as TinyURL, podcasts, blogs, and most disruptively I suggest, executable code, has spawned a communications platform that will blow right past everything except platforms that allow it to dominate.
I was fortunate enough to see the coming out party of Twitter at SXSW last year, and then experienced it again this year and wrote about the good and the bad in a summary post about 6 reasons I thought it “rocked and sucked simultaneously”:
http://rohitbhargava.typepad.com/weblog/2008/03/6-reasons-twitt.html
The interesting thing about most discussion is that people are focusing on whether it is useful or a waste of time. In my experience, it’s both. At SXSW, standing in line trying to find out where the better party with no line was, it was essential. Yesterday, as I spent the day doing real work, my only update was “working in DC.” Like any other tool, I think there are moments when it’s the perfect platform, and others where it’s nothing more than a colossal time suck. The trick is to tell those two times apart.