Article: "Why Twitter will Endure"

Reading the article on "Why Twitter will Endure". . . Some interesting ideas:

(1) Twitter discussions tend to be pretty civil, because people don't necessarily follow EACH OTHER, so if you flame someone, it's YOUR followers who will read it, not theirs. (That's kind of cool.)

(2) You can dip in and out of the "Twitter stream", and get a pretty good sampling of something like the day's major events pretty quickly. (Maybe I'll take the time to try to set up the right tweet followings to accomplish that, at some point. That could be useful.)

(3) Similarly, you can get a sense of what's going on that's "really important" by seeing what LOTS of people, across a broad spectrum, are tweeting about that day.

(4) People have to be brief on Twitter, even those who might be overly verbose elsewhere. Those who tweet really well make every character count, with links, hash tags, etc. (Maybe that's part of why it hasn't appealed to me as much. I kind of like to take however many words I feel I need to say something. :-) )

(5) Occasionally it can be really helpful to get the kind of up-to-the-minute information that can come through Twitter, like if you're travelling and a terrorist incident suddenly leads to increased security measures at airports around the country.

The article also contains a link to "a seminal article about Twitter": http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1902604,00.html