OMG LOL

Try the name Michael Johnson... At least with how many people there are with my name it provides some level of anonymity.

Well, that's the conventional wisdom. Reality is that that's a damned lie.

Now I have no idea why Twitter is popular. It's just RSS with an SMS gateway.

The simplicity of it helps. Starting from scratch, here is what you have to do to post something on Twitter and RSS:

Twitter:
1. Goto twitter.com
2. Create an account
3. Post
4. Tell friends your twitter ID

RSS:
1. Research various web hosting companies
2. Sign up for one web host, by paying a monthly fee
3. Research RSS programs
4. Decide on an RSS program
5. Write something and post it
6. Tell friends a complicated URL to follow, and also help them understand what RSS is and that they need a program

Accessibility is a big thing, especially when talking about a product or service for the mass market. Twitter is a consumer service, not just "RSS with an SMS gateway". It lets people tell others what they are up to, in a quick and efficient way.

Yeah, but you can do the exact same thing with, for example, Facebook, which was already wildly popular before Twitter was developed. Not that I'm intending to promote Facebook, either.

The big difference is that Facebook lacks a native SMS implementation, and also lacks a lot of third party apps to interact with the service. I never post to Twitter via their site, it's always via a program either on my Mac or on the iPhone. Facebook is also a mostly closed loop type of setup, whereas Twitter has some value in the openness of most users posts.

Overall, I've found value in both Facebook and Twitter. Sure, I could go make my own site somewhere and post similar things, but the centralization the two services offer is a big deal.

It's interesting you keep mentioning SMS. I know a large number of people who use Twitter on a regular basis and none of them use that mechanism. They all use a web browser or app on their phones.

SMS was popular with a lot of the early users of Twitter from what I remember hearing of it on podcasts. Mostly because it provided people without a smartphone with a way to post when away from the computer, and keep tabs on friends. A friend of mine still uses the SMS method of posting, even now that he has an iPhone. Guess I should recommend an app to him.

I thought the whole point of twitter was so you could post using an old phone via sms. If you have a phone with a real browser why not just have a blog ?

I don't use it so I a probably missing something.

Mainly because "I'm going to the bathroom, be back in 10" doesn't make for a very interesting nor compelling blog entry. Besides, Twitter allows you to keep sending out little messages even while you're on the throne.

Twitter's the greatest thing since appendicitis - and it fits in a bread box.

Well, the real reason is that instead of a blog, which is essentially an island, you get Twitter...which is like millions of tiny, really close islands

But that's basically it. Twitter is more community based than millions of disconnected blogs, and a whole lot easier for the average person to get started on.

There are some really cool products that try to make blogging more community-driven, like Disqus, but that requires a lot of setup and hoping that everyone else uses the same commenting system.

So that's my one defense of Twitter. It's not a solid one, though.

It has exactly the same problem as blogs which is that to be blunt most people/blogs/feeds really aren't that interesting. You have to sift through the dross to find the handful of decent blogs or twitter feeds. This isn't a problem with the actual service behind it though. Just that there really is a lot of junk and its hard to find the decent stuff.

I can see some uses for Twitter but I'm not personally a fan of it. The artificial limitation to 140 characters just promotes the compression of messages into barely understandable gibberish. At least with SMS you generally have the ability to span multiple messages if you want to send a long message.

Oh god, I hope I wasn't coming off as anything but agreeing with everything you just said I don't mean to defend the service, only to explain the idea behind it. I don't agree with it, though.

For one thing, there is absolutely NO defense for Twitter as a commenting system. It utterly fails as one, as you usually can't see all the comments, and even if you could, you'd see too many repeated comments (which isn't usually a problem for blog posts), and there's no threading at all. Even a blog with a flat comments thread on posts can develop a real conversation. Twitter fails completely at this.

One could certainly imagine Twitter supporting a real notion of a comment as distinct from a top-level post. FriendFeed got this better than Twitter. The place where this falls down is if the comment volume is too high for any one user to digest. At that point, you need some sort of collaborative filtering, as in Slashdot, to help you ignore the bogus comments.

Wow... The latest. All the adults who wish they were emo kids and many "web-pundits" are lamenting the disappearance of a site that tracks "favorite" twitter feeds. "favrd" - how trite. I suppose it's shorter than "fav0r17e" but only slightly less nausea inducing.

Twiter = world's biggest circle-jerk.

I can't wait for Web 3.0 when we can move past all this pretentious and self-important crap.

We have so failed as a species. This is the "best" of Twitter.

I'm going to start using "twitter" as a the 2010's version of the word "lame." Maybe I should get a twitter account and post that.

I kind of chuckled at the Tiger snipe.