Twitter: Pattern vs. Abstraction

Jaffe posted a query to the Twitterati this morning: “does it make sense to write about Twitter in my book, "Join the Conversation" - do you think it has staying power?”

I say yes, Twitter has staying power. But I’m not sure what kind yet.

Twitter is clearly easy to use. It’s somewhat addictive. But is it truly useful?

My buddy Chris took one look at Twitter and said, “I just don’t have the time…” There’s enough on our plates keeping up with email, IM, Blogs and social networks. Let alone actually doing the work our clients and employers pay us for.

I see Twitter’s appeal, and thus its potential value, as a large pattern. The individual posts aren’t important. It’s the sum of all those posts that add up to something cherished by communicators and marketers. It’s the community on one hand, and it’s the output of the community, on the other.

But is that output ordered, or abstract? Does the 50,000-foot view of Twitter look sensible and logical, or a bit of a mess (with apologies to Pablo)?

Let’s say you’re a project manager. You’d appreciate Twitterizing your entire team, so it’d be easy to keep up on the status of humans and their work. (But then, isn’t that what IM is for?) An organizational manager might appreciate being able to keep quick tabs on an overall mood, the ebb and flow of an organization’s emotions. (But then, isn’t that what company picnics are for?)

Consider social networks. Or YouTube, for that matter. They were new once, too. Were we aware of their complete “usefulness” in the beta stage? (Are we even sure of their usefulness now?) Maybe the point is in the trying, in the experimenting, in the twittering.

We don’t know if Twitter has staying power yet, but we’ll never know if we don’t give Twitter the old college try.