Twitterers re-discover the early Internet was fun

Bill Thompson on the BBC site, interesting observations on the subject of Twitter:

But the sense of presence that can be achieved is remarkable, especially when you're sitting at your computer working, connected to the internet and with a Twitter client running on your computer so that tweets appear as they are posted. It's rather like reading a novel, where you stop seeing the words on paper and find yourself immersed in a world created for you by the author.

After a certain point Twitter becomes part of the background to life.

Two things I noted about this:

Firstly, my email client (Thunderbird ) does exactly the same with my email, I see a little box as emails come in - so the "ambient intimacy" effect is not just a Twitterthing (or maybe it is to most people - maybe the only reason they see Twitter as uniquely ambiently intimate is its the only service they have got thats set up this way?). Yet poor old email is universally derided by the Web 2.0 set (its one of the mantras, y'know) despite the fact that its still much more flexible. I suppose email is now seen as a "work" thing whereas Twitter is a "fun" thing?

Secondly, I recall setting up Twitter in this way a year ago when I started playing with it, and all I got was a river of drivel as people "microblogged" on the most banal bits of their miserable existences. Some still do, but the big change I have seen in from about the last quarter of last year is that the signal to noise ratio is going up as people start to post thought provoking stuff, interesting links etc. Some people still do witter on about the most unbearably lightweight bits of their lives, and it would be nice to have a spamfilter in Twitter that culled these posts.....so watch this space.

However, Bill is spot on about the behavioural phenomenon it produces:

But as I sit here writing this I feel connected to a community of people, feel that we share a space that none of the social network sites can conjure up, a space that is both here and not here, somewhere between offline and online.

And I feel that I have a foretaste of what tomorrow's network world will bring, when the boundaries have dissolved completely and we can experience the network directly through augmented reality contact lenses or direct neural connections or whatever other technologies make it out of the lab and into the streets in the next decade.

The irony, of course, is I get the same buzz from the "ambient intimacy" of all those emails from the various Yahoo Groups I have been a member of for the last decade or so, and it was fun back then too, when it was about cool people doing cool stuff. It still looks and feels exactly the same incoming, only difference is I can sort them in my inbox....

So, that foretaste of tomorrow's network was available 10 years ago or so - heck, I even recall Peter Cochrane at BT Labs talking about Neural Connections back then

Still hasn't arrived yet in any real sense though......

The difference, of course, is that now the Web has got a 2.0 after it so it's all a Very Different Thing

Update - good point made as comment below by David Wilcox re Twitter etc differing by you choosing who to follow (as opposed to what subject to follow in Groups of old). This tells me we are in a situation more like the very early internet, before it had to branch to be manageable. As the New Communities get bigger, will Twitter split (Splittr?) by community type, and if so, how? As I noted above, what I would dearly like now is a Noise Reduction Agent that strips out posts from people I follow that are not interesting to me. Thinking about whether that's a whitelist or blacklist system.....