Please no conversations on Twitter

I love Twitter, hell I even secured myself the wonderful username “o”, which is a naturally scarce username length for those that have not noticed. :)

But that is not what this is about. The thing is that I think there is one relatively simple thing, among others, that makes Twitter so successful: it hinders conversations. I do not mean on a grander scale. It’s the wonderful enabler for long-term disconnected conversations. Maybe the more correct term for what twitter does not have so much is _chatter_.

Yes do you have lots of people talking about stuff that might not be interesting to you, but it is your decision who you want to follow and there is an option to even follow a lot of people and still see what is going on. Perhaps those of us who have grown up in IRC times remember that a chat with 200 people was impossible. Thinking about it and comparing it to twitter, it’s as if you had 2 million people in one chat room but you are only seeing those lines of the people you follow. That models brakes conversations over the entire space in a big way and hence keeps down the volume immensely.

The reason I am bringing it up at this point is that I really hope that Twitter will not put too much emphasis on enabling more conversation to happen. It is already happening but not real chitchat among 5 people and that should be something that should not happen. Imagine somebody asking something and then being able to go into the thread of that question and have a discussion easily by referencing that post. For all people just seeing part of that discussion it is totally useless and making the discussion easy means it will happen. So please people of Twitter, make it hard as it is now.

And while I am at it, please remove Re-Tweets. I admit, I did it once because it is so much easier to Re-Tweet then to write your own words, but that again is the point. It gets too easy. Twitters goal should not be the highest volume of Tweets by each user, but the long term bonding of relationships. This is where possible value comes from.

So how many people that still tweet more than once a week (fully enough) have an increasing number of friends in both direction? That would be the core user group I’d say, next to the echo chamber ;)