Everyone seems to be talking about Twitter at the moment (I think in no small part thanks to the excitement around it at SXSW), and just to stand out from the crowd, I will too.

It's definitely the Marmite of web 2.0 applications. A lot of people love it (or at the very least are addicted), but a good many are looking down their noses and tutting loudly at it (so maybe more like crack than Marmite).

If you don't know then Twitter sits slap bang in the middle of the 'cool web 2.0 ap' category - basically a way of telling the world what you're doing at that moment (with the immediacy being at the core). It's a nifty little tool, highly addictive to boot, and doesn't look like it's going away fast.

It's evolving too - whilst some people are using it firmly for it's intended purpose of answering the quesion 'What are you doing', there are a great deal who are using it as a kind of blog meets IM - publicising your latest thoughts via short, IM style messages. This is encouraged by the functionality which pings you with all the latest twitters on your friends list via IM (gmail chat in this case) or on your mobile. You can then reply to these twitters (the format of using a '@username' to direct a twitter at someone seems to have developed, e.g. '@distinctly: stop talking about what you had for tea'), opening up a dialogue.

What this does mean is you have to be more particular about who's on your friend list than, say, your bloglines subscriber list, as the updates are more intrusive and more frequent than a feed reader. Nick W seems to have picked up the Twitter ball and run with it recently - along with Robert Scoble, Steve Rubel and a good few others he's twittering(?) with a lot of good links, as well as pointing to new posts on his Click Influence blog.

Dave Winer points out a good use for this - working on group projects. Being able to constantly, and quickly let people know what you're woking on seems like a great use for the tool, especially if the team isn't based in the same room. I'm sure there are lots of other uses too, it will just take a while for them to be found.

What's clear is there's plenty of room for this to evolve beyond it's original intention (although I'm sure it's makers will claim they had this in mind all along), but in this way there are a lot of similarities to blogging, after all isn't one of the most regularly voiced criticisms of that medium 'who wants to read about what someone's just had for their tea'? There are always going to be comments you don't want to read (the public timeline gives some perfect examples), but it's when the right people get hold of it that these things come into their own.

But then I could be wrong. The novelty of the immediacy of Twitter may have just kicked in and I could well be bored of it in a few weeks (days? hours?) time. This could be entirely correct.

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