Twitter - first impressions

When I first heard about Twitter a long time ago, my first mental impression was that of The Osbournes show on TV. I signed up but the thought of running a live commentary about my life repelled me.

I had read about the role Twitter played in defusing the terrorist attack and rescuing hostages from Mumbai in late 2008. A few weeks ago, one of my colleagues in Luxembourg asked me if I felt "the" earthquake in San Francisco. "What are you talking about?", I asked. She replied that she learned about the earthquake that occured an hour ago through tweets from some of her friends living in the SFO bay area. I had learnt about a geological event right under my feet from somebody thousands of miles ago, thanks to Twitter.

The tipping point came last weekend when my GSI in a Leadership Communications class at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business presented a slideshow about twitter. She has authored The Twitter Book with Tim O'Reilly so I decided to check out her twitter site. As I explore twitter, I am starting to get hooked.

The usability of Twitter and its ecosystem has room for improvement. For a newcomer, the "What are you doing?" text field is confusing. "Who is asking" was my mental response. What I'm really being asked is "What is your tweet?".

OK, so I know enough to read and write simple tweets. What I didn't want to do is keep polling the twitter site to read the tweets. Since I use igoogle, I wanted to see how I can follow the tweets through a widget. Why isn't there a google gadget from Twitter that I can use to track personal tweets? I dont know if I can trust any of the third party widgets with my Twitter credentials.

A day later, as I read Sarah's tweets, I noticed they were posted through twhirl. Buried in the fine print at the bottom of the Twitter page is a link to apps and twhirl is one of them. Why aren't these client apps more prominently merchandised on the Twitter page? In the normal course of events, I wouldn't have trusted twhirl but I'm swayed now that I see somebody that I know using it.

Finding people isn't easy - you have to know their name and they have to use their real name to be found. Twitter does provide integration with gmail, hotmail and yahoo address books but it would be even more valuable if Twitter can link to LinkedIn, Facebook or MySpace networks.

A feature to search by affiliation would also be very useful. For example, I should be able to discover the twitter accounts of my cohorts in business school. For Twitter to explode, the discovery model should be significantly improved.