I didn’t know about the uses you were using it for. I saw barely any indication of intended purposes. That said, I can understand your annoyance–different people expect different things of the service. I don’t think any single use is actually wrong, it’s only clashing expectations that causes the issue, and some form of meditation is needed.

The very setup of Twitters encourages people to post spates of “whatever they happen to be thinking at the moment”, and there aren’t any guards in place except simply not friending people whose posts you don’t like. I do think some kind of group control might actually be nice to permit multiple uses of the service without having to sign up for multiple accounts, or to permit the more chatty of us to still associate with different-purpose people like you.

They will adapt it to the lowest common denominator of users, as Ev did with Blogger and Odeo. With seemingly little patentable in here though, others will adapt it to unique and high value contexts in which the same sort of functionality is applied to different problems and opportunities.

BTW - Dave McClure just Twittered “on twitter overload… turning off updates for a bit”

No, no, no. I’m not calling you a jerk.

I just think the way you’re using it, which Chris used as an example of why Flitter will jump the shark, is not the way 99% of people will use the service.

Simple. Cost. All the Twittering I do would be impossible if I were to be paying the sort of rates that mobile providers would like to charge me for them. It’s just not worthwhile at that price point.

The demand that everything turn a quick buck is the reason that nothing very innovative is happening at mobile networks.

Twitter is utterly addictive. The fact that it costs virtually nothing is part of that addictiveness. If I had to pay 50p per message, I wouldn’t touch the bloody thing with a bargepole.

Truth is, I have more than 1,000 people listening to me cause I’m providing a service (watching the other 1,000 and bumping up interesting Twitters).

But, I guess it’s more fun to claim I’m breaking some imaginary set of rules.

Screw those rules. Who made you Twitter God anyway?

Among accomplished users, there’s a tendency to use new media channels as old ones.

Developing buddy-groups would help with organizing info, true?

Server load does seem like a real issue, though.

I think they’ll be able to make some flickr like changes to make it easier to handle the traffic.

Though instead of family, friends, contacts, it might be which updates you only read on the web, which are sent to your phone, etc.

There is that functionality now if you send a code, but it should be easier to do.

There also should be a way to makre sure some updates aren’t publically displayed (instead of just making all updates private).

Some of this won’t be as easy if you’re just using SMS, but it should be possible through the web interface (and probably other apps which use the API).

It also may be that people start multiple twitter accounts for different purposes like Scobble’s silent scoble with just five updates a day.

It would be good to have a way to manage them just like multiple blogs on blogger so you don’t have to log in and log out.

I think Twitter is being misused by Scoble and others. The service is for sending messages to true friends and family, not strangers and loose web buddies.

I predict most normal people will have less than ten friends on Twitter. Each of those people will be someone you truly care about, and enjoy receiving text messages from.

I have used Twitter to update people on my mother’s health, my job status, and where I am hanging out. Who in the world is interested in that other than my real friends?

For loose connections, I will subscribe to their Twitter feeds and keep up once a day, or less.

The more I am thinking about this the more I am thinking that the addition of ‘audience control’ (as opposed to access control) may make this more compelling and save the day (this is something that a very smart professor / entrepreneur from UBC Vancouver shared with me at Northern Voice (don’t have his card with me). The groups feature makes it very compelling, a more stronger filter mechanism with advanced rules and a few other tools, could prevent this from being the end - with such tools, I have many business ideas that could prosper greatly, in addition to saving many lives.

I wonder why group IM chat on Mobile Phones did not take off like this? We have had the core functionality for years…

Jason, the limit of the message length and the original question is what really makes it different from simple blog posts - but if people don’t stay wihtin the context of the message (count me guilty) it depreciates the value for those people expecting such a boundary. The thing is, it creates additional value and allows for innovation too, so I don’t want to systemically limit the service, I just think having some tools and control mechanisms in place that are optional might be very healthy and helpful…