People do seem to want the public aspect of twitter, and that is its advantage more than anything, in my opinion. It is also its main disadvantage, however. On top of the public veneer of a packeted message bus, we have several ways of targetting the audience (with @), and group-like structures (with #), and ways of shortening long URLs and splitting longer messages, and various UIs that glue things back together. What we will end up with, once it is civilized, something very much like blogs with comments again.

In other words, your point is “Twitter is not public IM”. My point is that “People seem to want public IM”. They are not conflicting points, but they do encapsulate two different attitudes towards the phenomenon we’re dealing with.

Heh, it’s just funny when I think about how many times you’ve opened an IM conversation with me like that. What’s the fundamental difference between you doing that privately with me and doing it publicly?

… really? heh.

First, the only person I potentially annoy is you, not the rest of the world, and since in the past you have specifically stated that it annoys you, I no longer do it. Many folks start conversations similarly with me over IM, and it turns into an actual conversation. However it just seems to annoy you (which is fine, and why I no longer do it), although I’d say this stems from you not viewing IM as a real communication tool (which is one reason why it baffles me that you think Twitter is).

Second, I wouldn’t use twitter to tell YOU I’m bored because Twitter is not for IM in my opinion.

But really, I’m not going to respond much further on this unless you can tie it into the original topic. That’s not to say I want to halt conversation on it, but I feel you’re taking the topic off on tangents to avoid actually disputing anything I’ve said.

That being said, I haven’t read your post yet, which I plan to do next.

I’ve never seen a trackback show up on somebody’s blog as a new article of itself. To me, the artificial distinction between blog posts and comments – based simply on who started the conversation – is the most important thing (this is what Threadspinner was all about, and where I’m going with Forkable Type). Are you telling me that my comment here is just as prominent on your blog as your original post above? Why shouldn’t it be?Well, I know why: because it’s your blog, hosted and run by you for your purposes. That’s the point of a netural space where there is no turf.I expanded my reply to you here.

The argument you propose in your comment is a total tangent for what it’s worth. Twitter is no better at this, and I’d say is worse since from your original post there is no way at all to find replies aside from using search.twitter.com, and there is nothing that shows me there was definitely a response.

There is nothing that says a blog post needs to be multiple pages. It can be, “I’m bored” or something more in depth. Admittedly, the former is a bit absurd to make into a blog post, but I’d argue that it would be equally absurd on Twitter.

Heh, it’s just funny when I think about how many times you’ve opened an IM conversation with me like that. What’s the fundamental difference between you doing that privately with me and doing it publicly?

There’s no artificial distinction between a post and a comment with trackbacks either

I’ve never seen a trackback show up on somebody’s blog as a new article of itself. To me, the artificial distinction between blog posts and comments – based simply on who started the conversation – is the most important thing (this is what Threadspinner was all about, and where I’m going with Forkable Type). Are you telling me that my comment here is just as prominent on your blog as your original post above? Why shouldn’t it be?Well, I know why: because it’s your blog, hosted and run by you for your purposes. That’s the point of a netural space where there is no turf.I expanded my reply to you here.