What's With Twitter?

Twitter is like blogging but accelerated and concentrated. Rather than links, comments and trackbacks, we discover new people to follow through replies, both to you and to others. If someone replies to me with an interesting comment, or if someone I am following has an interesting conversation with someone I haven’t discovered, I am more likely to follow them. People who would otherwise go unnoticed in the blogosphere have found attention far more efficiently in the Twittersphere.

This is even more pronounced when you get noticed by the Twitter movers and shakers. As in the blog world where an A-List link can boost your subscriber count, this happens much more often on Twitter. Tweets are cheap, it isn’t a big deal to fire off a message, compared to writing up a blog post, so a conversation with a big named Tweeter can drive hundreds of follows with little effort or risk on either side.

There is also the “reciprocal follow” where someone follows you so you follow them back. It doesn’t happen all the time but it is virtually unheard of in blogging.

In the case of personal blogging, Twitter has mostly taken a big chunk of the action. Before we would subscribe to the feed of people we wanted to stay in touch with. Family, friends, or just people who we found interesting. Twitter now provides the same role, with the bonus of immediacy of updates and instant interaction.