The other day, a friend of mine (someone who should know better) asked me, “What’s the name of that really dumb site where everyone just posts what they’re doing?” My friend was referring to Twitter, which as I am coming to learn, is a simple yet very powerful communications tool.

When you log in to Twitter, you’re presented with a single prompt asking What are you doing? You get 140 characters worth of space to tell the world what you’re up to. Hit “Update” and your message gets posted to your profile and added to the positively massive public timeline, which includes all posts from all users.

For example, just before I typed this sentence, I posted this entry to Twitter:

Writing a blog entry about Twitter.

which you can see here at http://twitter.com/dkawalec

Pretty dumb, huh? At first glance, Twitter might seem somewhat self-indulgent or maybe even completely pointless. So, I can post what I’m doing to some website? So what?

Adding Friends
Twitter begins to show its value when you begin to follow other people’s streams. Not only can you view the posts of anyone else on Twitter, you can also add them to your Friends list and have their post feed intermingled with yours on your Twitter home page. As you add friends, acquaintances, or just people you think have interesting things to say, your home page turns into a vibrant real time stream of multiple consciousnesses.

Attracting Followers
Just as you can add friends and read all of their posts in your stream, others can add your posts to their streams. The people that add you to their friends list show up on your profile as followers. Followers are your audience. They are the ones who will be reading when you post something new.

Public IM
You can see that if someone is both a friend (you read their posts) and a follower (they read your posts), the two of you can communicate in what amounts to a kind of public IM session. Why not just use IM then? Because other people are reading the conversations too, and getting involved in them. These other people may have answers you need, points of view you never considered, or facts you’re not aware of.

For example, I first learned of the death of Jerry Falwell, not from the 11 o’clock news, not from CNN or even from CNN.com, not from blogs. I read about it on Twitter, when financialaidpodcast posted

Is it bad luck to say that I’m glad Jerry Falwell is dead?

With Friends
This is hands-down my favorite feature of Twitter. You can visit anyone’s profile (www.twitter.com/profile name) and click the With Friends link to see Twitter as they see it.

This experience is not quite voyeuristic — all Twitter posts are public, after all. However, you still get a sense of tapping into a view of the Twitter timeline that is specifically meant for someone else. This feature offers interesting insight into how other people are using Twitter, lets you see who might be worth adding to your friends list, or simply gives you the chance to virtually walk in another person’s shoes if only for a few minutes.

Microblogging
The ability to quickly publish tiny messages, and the fact that these posts are availble through RSS feeds, has led many to begin thinking about posting on Twitter (and on similar services such as Jaiku) as microblogging. I’m still getting comfortable with this term. First, because the working definition of microblogging seems to be, “what you do on Twitter.” Second, because I’m not sure that it captures what makes Twitter unique.

Microblogging implies something less than blogging. However, with its endless stream of posts, the stream-of-consciousness thought, and the near-frictionless interaction among users (made even more frictionless by the ability to add and receive new posts via phone text messaging and IM), Twitter seems to be, in some respects, a great deal more. It strips away the (yes, I’m actually about to type this) formality of blogs (with their “post/comment” and/or “post/counter-post” conversational dynamics), and leaves behind something more fluid and immediate.

On the other hand, I never feel like I have to catch up on what I’ve missed on Twitter. Posts on Twitter have an implied urgency (i.e., “This is what I think is interesting RIGHT NOW.”) to keep looking forward to the next post, the next discussion, the next idea. And the idea need not be earth-shattering. On May 18, it was a miserable and rainy in New York and I posted:

Today is a good day for soup.

I’d like to think that somewhere someone read that and thought, “yeah, soup sounds pretty good.”