In defense of Twitter

I keep having this same conversation with people lately, and although I am not an avid user of Twitter, I do “get” it. I keep running into people who don’t just not get it, they’re actively hostile to it.

Here’s my official stance on Twitter:

Twitter is an opt-in one-to-many (almost) real time chat with unlimited scrollback. It’s an asynchronous one-to-many communication system that merges the best aspects of e-mail (it can be private, remember), message boards and chat. But since you can join a conversation already in progress and catch up on what was previously said — it creates its own paper trail — it’s massively better than e-mail for work purposes. It’s also opt-in, so if you aren’t interested in what someone’s saying — we all have that friend who uses it to talk about his lunch every day — just stop following them.

E-mail, in comparison, takes a lot more hassle to opt in and out of, and if you want to go and join a conversation already in progress and catch up, you can’t.

At the end of the day, it’s just a tool, but it’s a tool that has some real value.

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