the twitter tipping point

I'm late to the Twitter party, but if the past timings of my adoption of a particular social media platform are any guide, I'm arriving at the Twitter tipping point.

Which means, everyone I went to high school with is about to tweet.

I actually signed up ages ago, but never got all that interested. It seemed like a feature, not a channel. Why tweet when you've got a status update to play with on Facebook?

I was wrong. It's a very different medium than any I've played with before. Formally, sure, it's familiar: that haiku-meets-pithiness of SMS, that click-and-go spontaneity of email, that addictively social time-suck of Facebook. But functionally, and outcome-wise, it's a different bird altogether. Partly because it just FEELS different.

It's been less than a week, and already I'm fascinated by how different people use Twitter so differently. There's a segmentation scheme worth writing up here. The archetypes are easy to spot. The every-minute-detail-of-my-life broadcaster. The haiku poet. The show-offy microblogger. The New York Times -- which simply serves up snack-size portions of itself. Brands broadcasting on Twitter seem sort of silly, but individuals can come off as even sillier. Boris Johnson, London's silliest mayor ever, is a brilliant Twitterer. I'm even starting to like him. (Beleaguered brands and celebrities take note.)

So I firmly believe that Twitter is a valid and rather important new medium. Sure, I've been yammering on about microblogs for over a year. But now, I'm even more convinced that it's an Important Internet Platform. I can imagine whole new forms of Twitter-ish fluency developing. Serialized narratives. Games. New kinds of news distribution. Shopping opportunities. You can already turn a tweet into a tshirt. The challenge is choosing which one to print.

The real time possibilities are alluring. Make it location-aware, enable more fluid filtering, allow intuitive on/off capabilities, and we'd have a medium thats both personally and socially empowering. And fun. And exactly the right size to fit in your hand, your pocket.

Without these modifications, Twitter will devolve into a cacaphonic spew of TMI. (Too Much Information.) But I'm optimistic.

Anyway, right now, I like it. It has a Wild West quality, like the early days of Second Life. And it has an addictive pull, like Facebook once did for me. I'm told the honeymoon period wears off. We'll see.