Twitter is still too new, and evolving far too fast, for anyone to have a full grasp of what it is and how it works — or how it might work next week, next month, next year… Even heavy Twitter users such as myself are surprised almost every week by new phenomena, such as trend fisting.

Of course with Twitter’s phenomenal growth rate, even someone using it for just a few months is still in the top 10% of “experienced” users — but that does not an expert make.

@cameronstewart

The river flows on…

Also, if your Twitter profile’s “Location” field is a set of latitude and longitude coordinates from your fucking iPhone and nothing else, you’ve already pissed me off. Oddly enough, I don’t have the world’s geography memorised to that level.

For some people, gaining followers is important. Those people usually work in PR, marketing or the media. They want a bigger audience for what they have to say. But another end of the multi-dimensional spectrum (!) Twitter can also be used to stay in touch with a small group of close friends or a family — and in that context “private” accounts make sense.

I don’t mind my personal tweets being public. Indeed, on Thursday the fact that people knew that Kate Carruthers and ’Pong and I were having a meeting in a particular pub meant that a couple of people dropped in to say “Hi”, and we were invited to a party because someone saw we were just across the road.

I’ll do a longer piece about my own Twitter use next week. Meanwhile, I have other things to write this weekend…

@Simon: You make an extremely important point about the difference between the people — the “community” or, more accurately, “the communities” — and the underlying technology which allows those communities to stay in touch.

I think the key difference between IRC and Twitter is that the communities all slightly overlap. Each IRC channel is its own closed-cell community, whereas on Twitter someone will speak to all their communities at once. I need to do an animation of this some time, I think…

Anyway, how do you think this will change as, it seems, Twitter “goes mainstream” in 2009? As I said earlier this morning:

OK, everyone, you can cancel your Twitter accounts now. @coldplay is here. #sharkjump

You will only hear from me on Twitter if, for example, I have taken a photo of an Airbus that has landed in the water beside my ferry. And you will be able to find it and follow me.

I’m distinguishing between the usefulness of the technology and the group of users who are putting large amounts of time into tweeting. That’s the part I feel is exactly the same thing as the YouTube community (a similar minority of heavy users subscribing to each other), or inhabiting IRC, or living in a MMORPG.

@lucasng: Hi. You’ve hit some more of the interesting aspects of Twitter that will ensure its sustainability — or the sustainability of something very similar with an actual business model.

I think the guys at 37signals are right here: A radical idea: Charge people for your product. Quite a few of the heavy Twitter users have told me they’d be happy to pay for it. A freemium model like Flickr would work just fine, IMHO.

@Yeebok Shu’in: Welcome. I think the trick to being interesting is not to try to be interesting, but just be yourself. Twitter asks “What are you doing?” but it could just as equally been “What are you thinking?” or “What are you seeing?”

@Mitch: You know, @gregdwyer has a lot to answer for…

@simon: blasphemer!!!