"I do not understand the utility of adding the SMS messages to a public webpage or making messages from my network public. I would have to pass on that type of offering. The ability to make messages private should be added asap."
You know, a lot of people still do think that Twitter is stupid. Myself included.
I've said before and I'll say again that I don't understand the utility of Twitter. While I think some people write amusingly on it, I've never seen what makes people so fascinated in it. I doubt I ever will.
Just because something's successful doesn't mean it's useful.
The immediacy of the conversation on Twitter is a big reason why people like it. It feels much more personal. The limit in length means normal people can write as well as popular bloggers, and everyone is forced to edit their writing.
If only all bloggers/comments were as constrained.
The only use I've seen for Twitter is the ability to follow companies for status updates or important announcements. The local university here is looking to do this for students, and I've seen several online services use it for downtime/updates.
But an RSS feed does the same thing already, and is in a format that doesn't make me have to subscribe to yet another site. With feedburner, there's no worry about feed traffic getting out of hand either. So I don't really see the point, except maybe as a marketing tool to the Twitter crowd...
Then again, my startup uses it too (in addition to our blog/RSS), and my business partner really likes it. So maybe I'm just clueless :)
Just to clarify, I don't mean conversation is useless, but I see other sites enabling that in a better way already. As a conversation tool, Twitter seems more like a feature than a full service.
So much data on there for us start-uppers to use for research, marketing, as well as building innovating services using the data. One could create a crowd sourced Rotten Tomatoes-esque site. One example of many what can be done with the data there!
Let me rephrase what I said. It's created a huge network, yes. I don't see any reason for me to use it. I think that limiting the messages is silly and arbitrary, and I've never understood what people see in it.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/07/15/is-twttr-interesting/
"I do not understand the utility of adding the SMS messages to a public webpage or making messages from my network public. I would have to pass on that type of offering. The ability to make messages private should be added asap."
vs.
"What a silly app… well, more like useless."