The Twitter Debate

There are some interesting conversations on Techmeme at the moment discussing the merits and downfalls of Twitter. It seems to have been sparked off by Twitter falling over during the MacWorld keynote speech and made more public Dave Winer discussing whether Twitter would be more stable if it were decentralised, but there’s a very interesting post by Scott Carp arguing that the real value of Twitter is it’s centralised database that stores the social graph that makes Twitter so compelling. A decentralised service would be no different to the Blogosphere which he describes as “…a loose affiliation that no one owns”. Russell Beatie also adds that a P2P model might suit it better. Pretty healthy debate so far and one that’s quite interesting.

I’ll be talking about a service soon that works on a decentralised model, but I can’t speak about it right now, so let’s leave it at that.

Back to Twitter, I agree with Scott above that the real value (to me) of Twitter is the collection of people I follow and conversations I have with them. I didn’t catch on to Twitter straight away, but now, thanks to TwitterFox and other Twitter tools I have amassed, it’s become a pretty good way to keep in touch with news and people .. to an extent that has surpassed my use of RSS to keep up with news and blogs (which is really scary). It has also reduced my IM time to a certain extent, in that it helps me feel connected with people “around” me in a more, albeit in a more voyeristic sense.

It’s also interesting to see people’s feelings about Twitter. Some people have just accepted it. some totally refuse to embrace it and some claim that it is too geeky. What about you? Do you Twitter? If you do, follow me here.

It’s an interesting journey .. wonder where it will end up …