Lifestream Responsibly

So says Brian Oberkirch in his How To Use Twitter Guide.

So far I’m following a daily wine recommendation (until 1st January when I’ll have to find a daily granola shake Twit to follow), Techcrunch, because they’re real heavy Twitters and I like the noise my iPhone makes when it receives an sms.

I’ve fixed the sms thing, dumped Trish, haven’t worked out the @blahblah, reply etiquette, nor how to do it. None of my friends are on Twitter and I can’t stop thinking about it’s potential. I dreamed I was a blue tit last night, a blue tit with a usb port and always on 100 gig wifi connection. I was half Korean and half French, but could only speak English and I was asking Tweeters to help me find my way home. Then I woke up to my daughter demanding she speak to Miss Piggy. I have foolishly introduced You Tube to her in order to placate the tantrums she’s having, on account of being 2 years old and dealing with teeth growth for the first time.

Biz Stone (is Biz short for something, like, Bizzle?) co-founder of Twitter usefully sums up what Twitter is all about:

‘… what we have is a sort of a device-agnostic message routing system that takes these messages from a variety of sources and then spits them back out again to whatever the preference is of the folks who are following it.’

It’s micro blogging direct to your mobile or IM client, sure you could get it as an email, but we all ignore email or get angry with it nowadays, so hit us where we’re talking. I just read a book called Digital Korea by Tomi Ahonen & Jim O’Reilly which points to the fact that the Korean youth have forsaken email for IM and sms.

Being able to disrupt this lifestream and communication channel is incredibly powerful, but as Brian wittily points out, has to be done with care - abuse it and you’re dumped, un-subscribed, un-ticked.

To me Twitter isn’t about the web, it’s about the mobile web and because every tech blogger worth his ajax is making predictions this time of year, I’ll extend my fibre optic cable and say 2008 will be ‘The Year of the Twit’.

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