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Evan Williams and Biz Stone of Twitter Robyn Twomey for TIME ENLARGE + Print Reprints Email Twitter Linkedin Buzz up! (44) Facebook MORE... Add to my: del.icio.us Technorati reddit Google Bookmarks Mixx StumbleUpon Blog this on: TypePad LiveJournal Blogger MySpace The one thing you can say for certain about Twitter is that it makes a terrible first impression. You hear about this new service that lets you send 140-character updates to your "followers," and you think, Why does the world need this, exactly? It's not as if we were all sitting around four years ago scratching our heads and saying, "If only there were a technology that would allow me to send a message to my 50 friends, alerting them in real time about my choice of breakfast cereal." Related Audio Host Katherine Lanpher talks with TIME's Just Fox on stocks vs. bonds and Barbara Kiviat about the housing market's new movement Download | Subscribe Specials The World of Twitter Specials Top 10 Celebrity Twitter Feeds Specials 10 Ways Twitter Will Change American Business Stories The TIME 100: The Twitter Guys by Ashton Kutcher More Related The TIME 100: The Twitter Guys by Ashton Kutcher The TIME 100: The Twitter Guys by Ashton Kutcher The Future of Twitter I, too, was skeptical at first. I had met Evan Williams, Twitter's co-creator, a couple of times in the dotcom '90s when he was launching Blogger.com. Back then, what people worried about was the threat that blogging posed to our attention span, with telegraphic, two-paragraph blog posts replacing long-format articles and books. With Twitter, Williams w

"Injecting Twitter into that conversation fundamentally changed the rules of engagement. It added a second layer of discussion and brought a wider audience into what would have been a private exchange. And it gave the event an afterlife on the Web. Yes, it was built entirely out of 140-character messages, but the sum total of those tweets added up to something truly substantive, like a suspension bridge made of pebbles."

"What are you going to get done with just a standalone Twitter? You're going to have a lot of conversations around something -- have conversations about content, collaboration, and people," says Ross Mayfield, CEO of Socialtext. "That's why I think something that is a conversational tool like this really benefits from a direct tie-in to the way you're otherwise working."

Twitter is a lot like a dinner with a large group of friends at a big table in a busy restaurant. Everyone is chatting, there's a lot being said, and if you're not focused on a particular conversation, it sounds downright noisy. So just like a large group setting in real life, there are some conventions about how people tune in to listen and the most effective ways to be sociable.

We've delivered social messaging in a way that delivers an integrated value proposition, which will take us into different use cases than just having a room where people can have conversations," Socialtext founder Ross Mayfield said in an interview.

This is a great article about twitter. And I really like the idea that it is a LOT about what we can DO with twitter data that makes it so compelling (all those great apps out there). "Websites that once saw their traffic dominated by Google search queries are seeing a growing number of new visitors coming from "passed links" at social networks like Twitter and Facebook. This is what the naysayers fail to understand: it's just as easy to use Twitter to spread the word about a brilliant 10,000-word New Yorker article as it is to spread the word about your Lucky Charms habit. Put those three elements together - social networks, live searching and link-sharing - and you have a cocktail that poses what may amount to the most interesting alternative to Google's near monopoly in searching."