I got interviewed by a writer for a business magazine on Friday about Twitter. Fittingly, Twitter's the only service I use regularly of the dozens of new Web2.0 social or communications sites, but paradoxically, it is also the one that I've yet to dedicate even a whole paragraph of writing. I had dismissed Twitter as a flash mob-type fad and resisted attempting to understand this multi-headed hydra.

I'm a big fan of Ries and Trout market positioning, and I keep their lessons in mind when I look at any service. They advocate the power of simple, clear positioning in the mind of the consumer. In apparent violation of those prescriptions, Twitter strives to be so many things. I realized that Twitter is so flexible and entertaining that users find their own combination of useful features. There is no incoherence because they focus on what works for them. Twitter's feature rich like a buffet or Swiss Army knife and there's definitely a market for those things.

Whether Twitter will turn out to be a mere fad or find legs and break out is something for the market to decide. But whatever its future, Twitter deserves to be studied like a movement or school in stream of art history. Here the stream is internet communications services. Online chat hasn't changed fundamentally since the inception of the currently dominant forms. Meanwhile mobile communication and social networking has risen and the web has spawned a new effort to reinvent itself (web2.0). Convergence and synthesis is happening all over the place and Twitter is certainly one of the shiniest new examples. Anybody starting a new social web service should take a hard look at Twitter and try to understand why it works. (The best tools of analysis probably come from the field game engineering, eg WoW or GTA, but that's another subject.)

So what is Twitter? Let's look at it through the prism of conventional categorization and maybe we'll get the gestalt by the end. The first group comprises functional features and the second abstract qualities:

• Social Networking System
• Chatroom
• Microblogging
• Multiplexer
• Group Communicator
• RSS Feed
• Salon
• Meme
• MLM

Salon

Perhaps by virtue of its origins - SF based with somewhat prominent founders -- and social networking and chatroom features, Twitter draws a slice of internet cognoscenti early adopters. Examples of solid but not flashy webizens I've seen are Christine Davis, Steve Smith, Frances Berriman, Lynn Wallenstein, and Stowe Boyd. Yesterday I saw Yan of Planyplus and Emily Chang. Just now, I see the artistic Johanna McDonald. This is just an arbitrary bunch of people I picked out to give you a flavor of the subscribers. Think tribe.net. (I hope these people don't mind being "outed" this way. I'll put the genie back in the bottle if you ask nicely.) Sam Sethi calls it a backchannel, I call it a salon.

Social Networking System

Works well. Twitter follows Flickr in deviating from the standard add/approve model used by the likes of MySpace. In Twitter, you can add somebody without their approval and they can add you independently. What you are really doing is subscribing to their message streams. It's like social RSS for microblogging. The profiles are simple, succinct and colorful. The personal URL in the profiles have a high emphasis befitting active webizens. People tend to find each other in the public timeline, ie the chatroom.

Microblogging, Portability, Multiplexing, RSS, Persistence

The unit of currency on Twitter is the message. In the typical chat context, the message is sent and published in the receiving chat client or in the chat room. Then it disappears as it scrolls off unless someone archives the log. In Twitter, messages are broadcast to cellphones, IM clients, web accounts and the public timeline, RSS feed, any or all at once depending on the sender and subscriber settings. For posterity, the messages are archived in time order with a permalink to each entry.

Twitter multiplexes the mode of messaging. Not only can messages be received through a mix of channels, they can be sent through those channels too: {IM, SMS, Web} -> { IM, SMS, Web}

The microblog entries - or lifestream - can be republished intact via Flash or other widgets that tap the API. Aside from media and blogosphere buzz, this viral mechanism could be a key marketing tool for the platform. A quick search using Google shows ~2,000 twitter badges on the blogs and ~160 on MySpace. Small numbers but supposedly growing fast. We'll look back in a few weeks to see how far Twitter runs.

Chatroom, Public Timeline

Twitter's public timeline and the people it draws reminds me of an IRC chatroom. In fact, some people from Twitter have formed a parallel #twitter room on the server blitzed.org. One way of spinning Twitter is seeing it as an elaborate marketing scheme for one chatroom. Whether by design or necessity, having only one public chatroom is huge way of concentrating attention and mixing people up in Twitter's bowling alley stage of adoption.

Clotaire Rapaille says we go to the mall to connect. Webizens go to Craiglist, the blogosphere, and now also Twitter to connect.

An irony is that people don't really connect much of the time on the Twitter public timeline. Some participants actively do, but many are not even actively aware of the public space. Their message entries get posted there automatically. The public space is really both a chatroom and an exhibition space: a grab bag of conversations and nonversations that provide easter eggs for what Rapaille would call a treasure hunt and I refine as a social treasure hunt. You see what you like and subscribe to the feed. Advertise your personality and someone might subscribe back. If it works out, you make new friends.

Group Communicator

Having a friends list, multiplexing, especially to mobile devices, ability and an API creates a platform for group communication. The problem with this function is that at this early stage very few people on the system are real life friends and all you have is a list of virtual friends with who you may not really want to keep up with all the time. But that's something that will get worked out once you get the world onto the system. Again, the Salon and Social Networking are proving effective at drawing people to the system and forming a sense of community. Other more pure attempts at group communication such as 3Jam work perfect technically but have a huge adoption problem.

I would like to have later the ability to partition friends into different groups. Both 3Jam and Yahoo's Mixd have this feature. Again, it's understandable that they concentrate everybody in this stage of their growth.

Meme, MLM

Twitter has claimed recently to have doubled the user base. I think a lot of it has to do with word of mouth and widget viral buzz. No slam against the widgets, but I wonder how many people who see them really care about what their friends are doing? I think men may care about what a particular gal is up to in a stalkerish way but do healthy people really want to receive real time and continuous status updates? I suppose I am being too heavy.

Perhaps Twitters widgets should be seen as the blog within the blog. Plenty of blogs share quick short thoughts. MySpace has already demonstrated the notion of blog sub- or collateral communication with the optional "current mood" and "Tell us what you're reading, viewing, or listening to" that accompanies each blog entry. The Widget merely generalizes this notion and gives the user to flexbility to place it wherever she wants. Optional to place, optional to read.

I say MLM because I see the widgets as self-propogating empty memes whose real function is building community. It's like round about way of advertising a club of internet wonks. Again, this perception of mine could change as more mainstream people jump on board.