As most of my readers (all 10 of you!) know by now, in the past few months I’ve become a pretty big fan of Twitter, the social networking service that has been exploding over the past year or so. For the uninitiated, Twitter is kind of a fusion of blogging and instant messaging. Users can post textual “updates” to twitter, limited to 140 characters each, supposedly answering the question “what are you doing?”. It’s a very simple idea that turns out to be surprisingly useful. I think of it as a “consciousness expansion tool”. It gives one a new kind of “window on the world” (at least the world of relatively tech-savvy folks with internet access) that is at once informative and entertaining. I’ve learned about many news stories before they broke in the mainstream press (the Edwards scandal for example), found out about some great deals, and met some very interesting people.

What makes Twitter better than most “chat rooms” or “bulletin boards” is a number of things:

– Its minimalist interface. There are no “rooms” or “topics” or “threads”. There’s just your “timeline” with your updates. 140 characters per update turns out to be a pretty good way of preventing “bloggorhea”.
– The API. Everything you can do on the twitter web site can be done via their API. 3rd party developers have created some great Twitter clients, such as twhirl and twitterific.
– The SMS (text messaging) interface. While Twitter had to turn this off for some users recently, this feature most certainly was and is a huge reason for Twitter’s popularity, especially among the younger, text-happy demographic.
– You are in complete control of who you “follow”. If you aren’t interested in what someone has to say, just don’t follow them!
– Everyone’s updates are public (unless you choose to protect all of your updates, but then you won’t get many followers). This tends to keep spam inappropriate content to a minimum. While there have been a few documented cases of abuse, these seem to be far from rampant.

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Twitter is definitely here to stay; the only question is, who will pay for it and how.

This week, BusinessWeek contributed an article trying to predict Twitter’s future. The article postulates that Twitter will either be bought or be forced to try generating revenue with ads. From a business point of view, that’s probably a safe bet.

My take on Twitter is that the service has become such an important part of the Web 2.0 infrastructure that it will be kept alive by feeding off the growing number of services it supports. My hope is that Twitter can leverage their position as an increasingly critical resource and remain relatively independent and hopefully ad-free. Clearly many companies would love to “own” Twitter’s 2 million+ users and all the juicy bits flowing between them. But I think the guys that run Twitter are smart enough to realize that once they sell out to the likes of Google or Yahoo! or – G-d forbid – Microsoft – a lot of their trust-capital (fragile as it is) would evaporate instantly. On the other hand, the one thing Twitter sorely lacks right now is the solid technical infrastructure and engineering discipline that one of these techno-behemoth companies could provide. Maybe a massively stable, scalable would be a fair trade for having all of my tweets owned by “the Man”?