Twitter has now developed and then taken away three functions that made it exciting for me to use.
1. Track was taken away a year ago. Only some of us tasted it, but it was da bomb. Twitter knows.
2. SMS notification was taken away from Australians (and some other non-US countries) about 9 months ago. It was a buzz to receive tweets from a couple of good friends via phone. It was the whole rationale behind Twitter in the first place.
3. The @reply brouhaha that erupted yesterday is still unfolding, but it looks as if the underlying desire is to limit following through to conversations one’s friends are having with people you are not following. As many people have said, serendipitous discovery is one of the richer aspects of Twitter.
When I went overseas last year I took lots of photos for my own record and pleasure. People always say they are interested in seeing photos from trips, but more often than not they don’t really engage with them. But I did try to make a short photoset to show to people who said they were interested. The paradox I discovered was that the more I culled, the less interesting the photos became: you are drawn to choose the more iconic rather than the idiosyncratic. For instance, if you have to choose one photo to represent your time in Paris, you are more likely to pick the Eiffel Tower, rather than the funny alleyway litter bin that you could imagine becoming a puppet character. However, it is the layering of the unexpected and unusual like the latter, which sets up rich memories and stories of a place for the person who experienced them. In the same way, Twitter and it’s users might find themselves operating within a similar paradox.
In the meantime we wait for Friendfeed or others to do what Twitter has so far reneged on.
