Twying out Twitter

With encouragement from my friend Perry Hewitt, I've been fooling around with Twitter to get a better sense for what all the fuss is about.  Conclusion:  it's a service that provides an asynchronous chat room for group interaction via SMS, and this has its place and time.

Families of parents and teenagers wandering in three or four different places in a mall.  Business teams coordinating logistics when not everyone is using mobiles with email.  Gonna be killer in classrooms where laptops have been banned to try to cure ADD (or Continuous Partial Attention, as it's called in some circles).  Also could be very useful in support groups where friends need to reach out to each other for help with impulse management and motivation.  And, yet another tool for Flash Mobs maybe.  SMS is an underused capability in my demo IMHO, and if Twitter helps drive adoption, that's a good thing as far as I'm concerned.

One other prediction:  a web site that gathers "Best of Twitter" transcripts, especially from people trying to one-up each other with inanities.

John Jantsch at Duct Tape Marketing also has a good perspective on this new service, and on why, despite the time sink, it's important to stay tuned into all this new stuff.