Martin Gordon's Blog

I posted this as a comment on Dave Winer's Scripting News for 03/14/07 (via Thomas Hawk). I don't want to forget it so I'm reposting it here.

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I have two big concerns with Twitter that set it apart from blogging and that could impact its success:

1. How do I find out about other Twitters I might be interested in? I only added people to be followed because they linked to it from their blogs. What about Twitter-only "bloggers"? Furthermore, blogging created a network because bloggers link to each other. The "@user" is limited because it requires so much effort to find that user. This could be solved by Twitter auto-linking when it finds an @user, but so far it doesn't do it.

2. It's too distributed. To follow a conversation, I have to either be following all the users taking part or sort through the "With Friends" section where other conversations may be taking place.

3. It's too concentrated. At least with Technorati, Techmeme, et al, I have a small chance of discovering gems in the long tail. This is practically impossible on Twitter since the only mechanism to discover new people is the public timeline, which will become increasingly useless as the service grows.

Technorati Tags: Twitter, blogging, Technorati, Techmeme, memetracker, Dave Winer, Scripting News