“The other day, I posted my first tweet with a swearword in it. It was a surprisingly emotional moment. I had to consider why I was swearing, and what it would do to my social graph, and whether I cared. In the end, I decided I didn’t care — the people who know me can follow, and the rest of them, well, they can leave.”

The justification for this service is that it allows you to view and manage an artificial social graph centered on your existence? Did padding your Facebook friends list become too tedious?

If you really don’t care what people think about you, why are you writing about how this service for preening and managing your own self-image is so great that it deserves to be elevated to the status of protocol?

“This notion of whether you care if you’re followed is an elephant in the Twitter room. People want to seem smart. They want the affirmation of retweeting. They want to be noticed.”

Is that what we need, a hub where insecure posers can jostle for attention and posture for each other?

I don’t want to attack you. But I think you need to hear frankly that none of what you write here is compelling to anyone not motivated to participate in online popularity contests.

In personal interactions, affirmation and validation seeking behaviors are habits of insecure personalities, exhibited by people who we conventionally regards as needing to develop their own self-confidence before they can function socially. Would you hang out with someone in person whose MO in navigating social circles is to find affirmation and validation?

“…I want to get together with others and bitch about them to feel reaffirmed. But if I love a company, I want to personally connect with them in the hopes of their affirmation and acknowledgement.”

Your writeup of Twitter here emphasizes as a benefit the fact that it plays to and encourages people to be affirmation seekers and toadies. I would argue that most people not only recognize this fact but also reject it as an undesirable feature.

On a related note, my day job involves helping clients monitor and block data loss over various channels. I’m curious as to who out there actually has a solution to monitor Twitter on the network and block it. Pardon me if you’ve covered this in another post, but does Twitter port hop and can it evade traditional network firewalls?

In short, Twitter is a human API. It’s being defined in real time in front of our eyes, through an amazing example of Internet Darwinism….

Today I was struck by the power of searching the “twittersphere”. Results come up in real time, it’s like an index into the collective mind.

To me, Twitter is the new “dial tone”. It is THE NEW protocol for connecting.

I just wrote a blog post in a similar vein, and then found this post. Nice thinking bitcurrent. Come check out my take on it -

http://thinksketch.wordpress.com/2009/02/25/from-microblog-to-network-protocol-how-twitter-will-redefine-the-internet/