I see Twitter as a River of Tweets, which are 140-character posts. The Twitter concept is Evan Williams’, Biz Stone’s and Jack Dorsey’s The river concept is Dave’s. I don’t know who named the tweet, but that’s what matters. Twitter is an easy thing to which anybody can add value.
What makes Twitter so good is that it’s lightweight and not ambitious about running your life. It’s more service than site. It’s part of the live Web, even though you can still find it in the static one.
The latest addition to the portfolio of fun hacks on Twitter (which include Dave’s Twittergram) is Politweets, which Ted Shelton says “brings out the really intriguing aspect of Twitter — the ability to tap into the pulse of some very interesting distributed event (like an election) and see what is happening”.
I’m sure there’s something on Facebook that does the same thing. But Facebook is AOL 2.0. It’s heavy and complicated and wants to run my life. So I mostly avoid it. My loss perhaps, but that’s beside the twin points of live vs. static and light vs. heavy.
Ev Williams did a nice job of explaining The Light Side in his talk at LeWeb3 last month. Here’s the video.
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