The EdTechTalk podcast used excerpts from my “Donning the Twitter Condom” post as the starting point for a recent podcast (Part 1 and Part 2 … things really start to drift a bit in Part 2 after Alec Couros leaves) and it prompted a few clarifications, further thoughts, and an open question or two.

The big open questions remain: what is it about Twitter that makes it fulfill a satisfying niche in the information eco-system and how is Twitter being used by communities of practice? Prompted by discussions at HICSS, I plan to do a bit of research into both of those questions at the same time… but even in my own online existence– in which Twitter has become an important part– I’m not at all clear about the first.

There was a misconception in the podcast which needs clarification. At multiple points listeners were told that they would see replies or Twitters directed to them (using the @username convention) even if they weren’t following that person. In fact, this is only true if you change your settings from the default (as I noted earlier). By default you don’t see @comments to people you don’t follow nor to those people…

The questions about how Twitter could monetize its users was interesting… but speculation that they were making money from Amazon now is quite the opposite of what appears to be going on. All the requests to Amazon one sees when they load Twitter come from calls to the Amazon storage service… so Twitter is actually paying Amazon for storage and access rather than the other way around!

I think the most interesting parts of the discussion have to do with the way Twitter is being bent to the shape of the people using it. Those who have no experience in a Community of Practice in Twitter or whose only experience involves the aggregated public stream have a hard time visualizing how Twitter is actually being used. This unintended use seems to be the norm for first generation social software apps, to the point that I wonder how much return there is for even trying to predict in advance the usage patterns for an application. Maybe putting up a lightweight set of social functions with a robust API is the secret. I don’t think anyone at Twitter– or anyone who started using it early on– had a clue that it would be put to the kind of small-group oriented, directed communication that characterizes the educational technology set.

An offshoot of this is the obvious need to have some kind of group capability in Twitter. I was surprised to learn that so many people opt to have multiple accounts, a tedious and awkward workaround to the lack of built-in functions to have multiple communities. This would also help take care of many of the issues regarding security and protected updates that were the topic of conversation in my original post.

Twitter on its own isn’t much… but it is amazing what people make of it. Clearly it fills a niche somewhere. There was some speculation in the podcast that Twitter activity was coming at the expense of blogging, a model in which blogging was posited as the more serious and sustained form, borne of concentration, while Twitter was seen as a sign of our ever-shortening attention span and propensity towards sound bites. That’s probably accurate for some… on the other hand, if it can be said in 140 characters to one’s satisfaction, then perhaps it would have been put into a blog only because there were no other better, more practical alternatives. I see Twitter as another piece in a puzzle that, when complete, will provide a full-spectrum of presence options for participation in our particular learning and living networks. I also see it as a way for widely dispersed colleagues to maintain a socio-professional community– a Community of Practice– with all the attendant social games, norm-creation, and expectations that we associate with such communities.