Leave us your @Twitter user name and we’ll all “eavesdrop” on you.

@guy_murray

I can see how it makes a good advertising medium, though. You can put just enough into a tweet to pique someone’s curiousity, use the “tiny urls” to disguise the actual link addresses, and it becomes a real treasure hunt.

As far as the issue of “information overload” goes, it’s only 140 characters… easy enough to skim the stream and only delve into the tweets that really interest you, and avoid the “Yay BBQ” type posts.

The Internet is rapidly evolving to an external model of distributed social networks, with more and more APIs for various kinds of data feeds, and shared identity. Two days ago Facebook opened up their activity feed/stream with a new API which has been highly anticipated by the fledgling but growing OpenID/OpenStack community. We are at the tipping point of a radical evolution in the structure of the Internet. What’s familiar today will look radically different tomorrow.

Did I say radical change? Yes. AOL and CompuServe once created something that ended up evolving into what now looks fairly standard as the Internet. A similar sea change is about to take place. Here are a few articles hinting at that change:

http://bit.ly/za0iQ
http://bit.ly/PcQHN
http://bit.ly/3ByaJC

Many are saying they don’t know exactly what the future Internet will look like, but also say it’s clear it will be revamped in many ways, where data becomes ubiquitous/liquid, identity is decentralized, and data/activity streams model not only the real world but a fantastical one as well. And Twitter will become a “has been” if it doesn’t modify it’s data stream model to fit a need greater than 140 characters.

Furthermore, within a half-hour or so of my signing up, at least 5 or maybe 6 people became my followers. I can’t help but wonder if “stalkers” isn’t a little bit more like it.

http://twitter.com/mikeinweho

Calls for help with sandbagging in specific neighborhoods were announced and responded to in real time. School closings, road closings, small leaks in sandbag levies, updated crest levels — it was all on Twitter first.

Beat the pants off the rest of the “organized” communication and other news outlets.

I have a friend who compared the tens of thousands of volunteers with ants. With so much work to be done, spread out over such a large area, and given the ability to communicate with virtually everyone at once, they (collectively) were able to complete the overall task about as efficiently as could be done. Add more Twitter to this equation (de-centralize the communication) and the work is allocated more efficiently. Take Twitter out (keeping all communication and organization strictly centralized) and you start to get logjams and inefficiencies very quickly. I experienced it personally — it was incredible.

Twitter can be a fantastic emergency preparedness tool. (Gives a new meaning to the term e-prep.) Future massive emergency/catastrophic efforts/cleanups, etc., like this could learn a lot from how Twitter was used in Fargo.

Jon

i just cleaned the upstairs toilet.
i need to watch the clock so i don’t forget to pick up my daughter from pre-school.
finished unloading the dishwasher.
another load of laundry.
555th poopy diaper changed.

see what I’m sayin’?

Your only hope if you have no life is too be terribly witty instead.
example:

so if you totally want to obsess about the swine flu, you can track it on google maps. watch death and destruction come straight to your door via the internet! yay technology!
or
I hope my daughter grows up to be just like paris hilton.

so, no, i’m not really twittering.