Yes, Twitter is indeed a chat service!

LOL, sorry Paul, I’m also going to be a bit sticky about this. See, the thing is this. If Twitter was not meant to be a chat service, then they should not have allowed for it to be used as such. Its a bit like Google giving a programmer all its source code and saying “here is all my source. Just don’t look at it or use it, okay?” That would kill a good geek. While it allows for chat it would be used as chat. Simple. It is the nature of us human beings.

The crutch is that while we use it that way, I have to agree with what Tyler said: FriendFeed needs to figure out a new algorithm for Twitter. 100% right. If Friendfeed offered me the functionality to exclude Twitter from my friends’ feeds, the problem for me will be solved. Without doubt. I also disagree that it is not their problem. They should be aware that the problem exists, so they should find the solution to make it work. People are much less likely to stop chatting on Twitter than leaving Friendfeed. Thats for sure!

As for Pownce, it would be much more difficult persuading everyone following me on Twitter to convert to Pownce. We are where our social network is. I hate Facebook, yet I use it now and again as a lot of my friends are there. No matter how badly I want to go to Orkut, getting them all on there would be a fulltime job, that is more that likely to fail as they’d have to convince all their friends, etc, etc…

3 Comments to "Yes, Twitter is indeed a chat service!"

• Charl van Niekerk said: On 03/18/2008 at 9:26 pm

  Yeah as we discussed on Jabber, we need Chat 2.0 and separate that from microblogging entirely.

  I’ll only be converted to Orkut though when they get their usability right and also they need to stop using ASP.NET because that’s just shameful. Every time I see that I want to laugh my head off that they are working on such a noob platform.

• Paul Jacobson said: On 03/19/2008 at 4:45 am

  Now that is just a collection of excuses, isn’t it? If, as you put it, “(w)e are where our social network is”, then “we” can move to another service that does what we need it to do. At some point “we” moved to Facebook and Twitter and eventually “we” will move on to the next thing.

  As for the FriendFeed issue, I do like the idea of picking which of your friends’ services you don’t want to subscribe to as a personal profile choice (Jaiku has been doing that for a while).

  I don’t see Pownce as a Twitter replacement (I wrote about this on chilibean a little while ago) but I do think that it is better suited for these sorts of contextual and threaded conversations. Twitter is still the best status update service I have used and this is why I keep using it but when it comes to conversations, I don’t think it works that well, certainly not beyond a response or two.

• Stii said: On 03/19/2008 at 5:41 am

  I’m not sure I understand what you mean by its a collection of excuses. It is not excuses, it is facts. You’re dead right, we will move to next big thing sooner or later. That is just how things work.

Spit it out!

Filed in: Social Web by: Stii