I have been working along with Tim Perry and Chris Stubbs on a Hot Team to produce a white paper on twitter similar to the "7 things you need to know about collaborative editing" paper. We were struggling to articulate how twitter is different than existing services in a concise manner when we had the idea of making the table below.
One thing that bothers me is that rows all correspond to a certain class of communication except for twitter, which is a specific service. I don't know what term to use for the service that twitter (and similar sites, like jaiku) provide. Any Ideas? Am I missing something? Is there anything you think we might be missing from the table?
| Instant | Social Networking | Mobile | Short | Public Archive |
|
| Instant Messaging | X | X | |||
| Text Messaging | X | X | X | ||
| Blogging | X | X | |||
| X | X | X | X | X |
Didn't someone already coin the term "Instant Blogging" as a cross between the quick short focus of instant messaging and the personal-to-community exposé of blogging? Would "tagability" already be a part of Social networking? It does seem that Twitter has succeeded in joining the group of proprietary eponyms that includes Kleenex, Scotch Tape, Band-Aids, and Jell-o; as such, it can be its own class.
What about, "instant status"? These services are designed to answer the question, "What I am doing at this moment
Jeff,
We do have "instant" as a column. Are you suggesting a difference between instant sending and ubiquitous capture? I see that as instant + mobile.
Brad,
I'm proposing replacing the brand name Twitter with its purpose which is providing instant status. Similar to Instant Messaging.