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The usual debate over Twitter Inc., the mobile "microblogging" startup that Thursday disclosed its first outside round of venture capital funding, usually breaks down along these lines: Yay: Twitter offers a new way to communicate electronically, expanding the range of expression available through blogging, the dominant mode of discourse on the Internet. Nay: Twitter's mad stupid. Underlying the latter idea is the view that "twittering," as the practice of posting messages with the service is called, often amounts to random nattering about trivial things, a kind of running personal vanity press for documenting all those moments in life when nothing more interesting is happening ("Hi, everybody! I just opened a juice drink!"). More seriously, the argument goes, all the tweeting in the world isn't going to build a business. "The Twitter phenomenon is an interesting demonstration of the possibilities of converging communications technologies, and that's about it," says tech writer John Quain. "No one over the age of 12 wants to know how many kibbles their friends' cats ate for lunch, or read every stray part of someone's internal dialogue (that's why it's internal). More important, the folks at Twitter haven't figured out how to make it appealing or useful to the rest of us. So expect to see a user churn rate higher than the national debt. What could help? Lower cell-phone charges would help — and maybe some more interesting friends." As a new twit, I mean twitterer...-ist, I know what JQ means. First of all, I already keep an exact record of how many kibbles his cat eats, so that's covered. More serious is the charge that Twitter lacks utility. And that's where I find myself slinking into agreement with Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures, which funds Twitter. If I take Wilson's meaning correctly, Twitter's strength as a platform for communicating by IM, text messaging or the Web owes partly to its apparent weakness, namely, that it lacks immediate commercial purpose. As often as not on the Web these days, users — not makers — invent a purpose. Judging from the raft of new applications mashing up with Twitter, that process is well underway. Value, commercial and otherwise, flows up from the digital masses. As Wilson says, "Twitter encourages people to adapt and invent behavior to suit their needs." Sure, it's fair to ask the usual questions about Twitter's inchoate business model. But inventors commonly don't comprehend a new technology's potential. Thomas Edison famously thought the phonograph he invented would be used chiefly to record a dying person's will (which in the end is pretty much the same as listening to the latest Celine Dion cut). While Twitter lives, it's quite possible the business of Twitter is some years off, waiting to germinate as people "adapt and invent" novel ways to communicate. —Alain Sherter See j-q.com Tags: venture capital, microblogging and Twitter
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