“Again with Twitter?!”
Yeah I know… Twitter is here, get used to it.

Alright, so what does Twitter need? First one who says “a business model” gets a cookie. Yes, they do need that, but let me take a detour through the user side of things for a moment and I’ll get back to that in a minute.

As I have said before, Twitter’s simplicity is its strength. I don’t think they should give it up for anything. Others have tried to “enhance” the user experience by adding threading and things like that. An interesting idea on paper, but it does take away some of the product’s usability. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a hater; let’s just say it’s different and the crowds seem to be gravitating towards more simplicity.
So Twitter has to stay simple, but there is still room to expand. And I think topical conversations is indeed something that could enhance the user experience tremendously. If done right, and in the spirit of the product.
In comes the #hashtag. We all know that you can use these to specify what topic you are talking about. This is incredibly useful and I strongly believe Twitter should make it its next big push. So to put things clearly:

@notpatrick thinks @twitter should embrace #hashtags and make them the second arm of the community.

Here’s how it would work: you follow @people the way you always have, and you can also follow #conversations. These would work pretty much the same way: if you follow #grammys, anytime anyone says something in that topic (with a #grammy in the message), you see it in your feed. Thus following the global conversation that you’re interested in.
Of course, this has a huge potential for overflowing / making your feed unreadable. Just separate the two: add a tab on the front page for your conversations feed, and make it an option to merge the two.
It also has a potential for spamming: the one internet vice that Twitter is spared from because you choose who you follow. If anyone can add a #something and be on 20.000 people’s feeds, it will happen fast. But there are ways to control it (you need to sign up to be on twitter) and a clever use of crowdsourcing (a “signal user as spammer” feature) would pretty much smash the issue on the spot.

And just think of how much we would get out of it though: the Twitter dynamic mixed with information you care about and opinions from around the world. Discover interesting people, learn new things… A new world of possibilities opens. Now that the Fail Whale is nothing but a distant memory and that Twitter is a reliable tool, I think the team should concentrate their efforts and get this integrated into the service and API.

So what’s the upside for them you ask? Well, not only would that be a great for the users, but I think it would also hold the key (ok, a key) to the long awaited business model for the service. Sure, they could make the general API a pay-for acess as other have suggested, but I think this could also be an avenue worth exploring.
We have been promised no advertising in our regular feeds, not now, not ever. And I agree that it would be both an inconvenience and a sort of invasion of privacy. Not so in the #conversation feeds. These are general conversations that no one really has ownership over, hence no sence of privacy. As long as your regular @people feed is protected, I think most people wouldn’t mind seeing an ad an hour in their #conversation feed.
Now if we agree on this, think about how insanely tailored those ads would be! Not only do they already know all about you (your tweets, the people you follow), but now they would also know precisely what you’re interested in (the conversations you subscribe to). This would be Google Adsense on steroïds and would sell like virtual hotcakes.

There you go Twtter, problem sovled. Get on it.

And baring that, third party clients like the wonderful Twhirl from the Seesmic team should integrate that functionality. Like, right now.

[Edit: People are noting that this is already possible in some third party apps, which is great. But this is only a stopgap; having it integrated in the stardard site and API is the only way to make it truely universal and push the feature's use. And the only way to allow for monetization of course...]

[Edit 2: Another possible monetization: I would actually pay a buck or two a month for an added service like that, and I'm sure a lot of other people would too.]

Alright, so everyone has heard about it. Some of you probably use it. But most people have a very hard time explaining what the heck Twitter even is…
So I’ll try my hand at this. The aim is to write a short description of why so many people love Twitter so much, and explain why it is a major new form of communication, just like email and instant messaging were in their time.

If I do things right, next time your friends ask you about Twitter and you go insane trying to explain it, you can just send them to this article and they should have a vague idea of why it’s such a great tool.

Ok here we go.

What twitter is

First let me do a brief description of how it works:

1) You create an account and send short “status updates”. This creates a page where all your status updates are displayed chronologically (twitter.com/yourname).

2) You chose other people to “follow”. The updates from all these people will appear on your twitter home page when you log in (twitter.com/home).

3) Consequently, all the people who follow you (friends, family, fans) will see all your updates.

4) If you include “@nameofperson” in your message, that person will see it whether they are following you or not.

5) You use the site and third party software on your computer or phone to read your page and send updates in the easiest way possible. Some will allow you to attach location and picture.

That’s it.
It might seem simple and obvious, but this tool effectively creates a way for thousands and thousands of people to communicate effectively without talking over one another.

“Dude, it’s just like Facebook” – “Hey, I can do that with Messenger!” – “But email works just like that!” – …

First of all, don’t “dude” me when you’re talking about Facebook, it makes you sound like Myspace. And second, I can assure you that whatever you think it’s like, it is not.
Twitter is very unique for a great many reasons. Understanding that is important. So to that effect, now that you know what twitter is, let me tell you what it’s not.

What twitter is not

- It’s not email:
If you want to send information to your friends via email, you will have to manually select each of them. Here, one “tweet” will instantly go out for everyone to see with no effort. It also has an Instant Messaging quality to it, so people don’t need to “check” their email, they will most likely get the update instantly.

- It’s not Instant Messaging:
You are not required or even expected to see and / or respond to anything on Twitter. If you’re there to read it, fine. If you’re not, cool. You can read those later anyway. Sort of like you would on Facebook: you check it whenever you have time to keep up with your friends.

- It’s not Facebook:
Social networks are typically symmetrical, meaning that whoever you are friends with also has to be friends with you. You hear what they say, they hear what you say. So no one person can reasonably claim to understand anything if they’re above a couple hundred friends (oh, and I don’t care what your friend Casey says, she doesn’t actually have 346 friends).
Twitter is asymmetrical, so if you follow someone, they won’t automatically follow you too. This means that one person can be followed by hundreds or thousands of people and not be clogged with all the constant updating they will do. Great for famous people. In a way it’s kind of what happens on a forum: you put something out and lots of people can read it.

- It’s not a forum:
A forum is complex and very segmented. If you want to talk about this, you need to do it here, in that thread, or you will disturb its flow. Twitter has no real categories per se, deep meaningful conversations isn’t what it was designed for. Sure there are ways to categorize your tweets (#topic will classify your tweet as related to that topic), but in essence it’s more “short bursts of conversation” that die out rather fast. It’s like having a constant giant chat room along with you all the time.

- It’s not a chat room:
Chat rooms are impossible to moderate when you go above a certain number of participants. Not so with Twitter, since you yourself chose who you listen to. If someone is bordering on spammy, just drop them and you’re fine.
But at the same time, other people will listen to different people, and the whole network is pervasive. For example, you follow A who says something awesome (Chinese Democracy rocks). You repeat it in your feed, and B and C hear it too, and respond (Chinese Democracy sucks). A might follow C and say something to that response (Eat crap you Celine Dion lover!)
Like I said, a giant room with thousands and thousands of people having conversations at the same time and not talking over one another. And believe it or not, it’s both civil and interesting most of the time. It has to be: when it’s not, you just stop listening. It’s like magic, really.

So as you can see, Twitter is a little bit of everything else but not quite the same as everything else. It borrows from the ways we use to communicate today, blends them together, leaves some things out, adds some things in, and comes out as something completely new.

And it doesn’t replace the old things either! It just adds to the mix. No one stopped using email when ICQ came out and IMs became popular. No one stopped calling people on the phone when email arrived. New tools just make some things easier, very rarely are they supposed to replace the old ones. So I can assure you that Twitter is not supposed to be Facebook or email, nor should you not want to use it because you already have those.
Twitter is another tool that lets us stay in touch and communicate and exchange ideas and knowledge (and essential information about the number of cups of coffee you’ve had today) in a new and wonderful way…

In closing

So I guess I’ll stop there; by now you hopefully have an idea of how and why Twitter is as innovative as it is cool. But to really understand the beauty of twitter you have to try it for yourself. I’m sorry, I know it’s what everyone says, but it’s because it’s true… So please give it a try and see if you like it. You might not, but at least you’ll know what all the fuss is about.

By the way, you can follow me at twitter.com/notpatrick. You won’t be sorry.
Well, you probably will, but it’ll be too late.

Democracy isn’t a perfect system, it’s just the best one we’ve found yet. And as with anything that’s not perfect, you’ve got issues that can become pretty freakin’ annoying after a while. On the Internet, which is probably the most extreme form of democracy we have, everyone can express their opinion equally. And it seems that most of these are: “THIS SUCKS!”

I’m sure you’ve come across this idea yourself: whether it’s on the net or in real life, it sometimes seems like people are never happy. About anything. “People” will bitch and moan all day long, and all you hear about in the news is controversy. And from there it’s easy to go to the conclusion the rest of the world is a bunch of dumb saps that will always be unhappy, no matter what the topic is.

Well, while I agree that most people are probably dumb saps, I still think that this view is a sort of optical illusion. The thing is, there is no idea in the world that will get a unanimous approval. And I mean none, like, ever! Go with me on this: try to think of an idea that would garner universal approval in a modern western society. Even the brightest, shiniest, happiest proposal would get a couple of groups of people who would violently oppose it. As long as it’s something “realistic”, it will make some people unhappy.

- Universal healthcare is a great idea in theory (give medical care to the sick), but you get the obvious and valid question of “who’s gonna pay for it?”
- Stopping the wars and the horrors in the world would be awesome, but who has the right to decide what’s right for other people? Some will say “why the hell aren’t we doing something?!”, and others will aswer “you had no right to go in Iraq”…
- Let’s give condoms to teenagers so they don’t get STDs! “Oh yeah, but they shouldn’t have sex in the first place!” Well, let’s prevent them from having sex then. “Dude, have you ever met a teenager? They will have sex no matter what, seriously.”
- Let’s tax cigarettes and prevent people from smoking indoors, surely noone will opose the idea of not getting sick. “Hey, you’re taking away my freedom to do whatever the hell I want!”
- Give free puppies to every sad little boy and girl in the world. “Yeah, and who’s gonna clean their crap off the floor?”
I guess you get the idea.

So  my premise is this: there will always be some people sincerely opposed to any idea you put out, no matter how great it sounds to you and yours.
Now think of a world where everyone can express their opinion. We don’t actually have a lot of experience with this concept. When democracy was first conceived, it was very loose on the definition of “everyone has a voice”. But in a modern democracy, for every single idea in the world that is expressed in a public forum you will find a group of people that will be very critical about it.
And they will have the rights (democracy) and the means to express themselves (Internet or traditional media).

Is that really a good thing? Is there such a thing as too much democracy? Boy is that a can of worms…

So anyway, from there it’s very easy to think that “people” criticize everything. Of course, in reality you only have one have a fraction of the people actually complaining about each topic, but the result is that every idea and opinion gets shot down and criticized. And this gives the impression that “people” in general are never happy.

Well, I’m probably not saying anything that you don’t know already. I just wanted to formalize this a bit, because I tend to be very cynical and declare that “people always complain”. I should remember: it’s not that everyone complains all the time, it’s that there’s always someone that will complain.

And it’s just… Sometimes I wish they would just shut the fuck up. But they’re entitled to their opinion. And that’s the problem with democracy.