From Lee and Sachi Lefever comes this great video that explains the basic appeal of the micro-blogging platform twitter - in essence what it is about it that is interesting as one first gets into it.
Then in the a perhaps even more interesting comment section of Twitter in Plain English viewers discuss what it is about Twitter and the video that piqued their interest
On the other hand, Dean Shareski a well known tweeter who has risen to the top of the tweeterboard as @shareski totally disagrees with the simple presentation. He writes in his blog:
"I know, he can’t share it all in the time constraints of that format, but I’d have to say that if I didn’t know what twitter was, I’d watch that video and say, “that sounds stupid”. That’s how I‘ve always felt about any explanation."
The thing is - I agree with both points of view. Twitter in Plain English tells the basic story of twitter. And twitter works just that simply for some people - and probably for most of us in the beginning that's exactly how it functioned, and how it hooked us.
Even Lee Lefever's introductory story of how person A follows person B and learns about their taste in sports or books hints at something about how twitter goes beyond what one would initially expect and - like a virus we're not protected against - quietly and without warning deepens our involvement.
There's the hint in even the most simple explanation that we may hear about other people too, thus expanding our network, our base of friends, our caring about other people we have never met.
So the power of twitter is really in seeing the potential and acting on that. It's in the connections and the sharing that comes after the snippets we share. It's in the follow through. And continuing the conversation.
That story might be a bit much for Commoncraft to take on in the In Plain English series.
But it could be a Commoncraft play in three acts, showing the trickle down effects of the twitterspere.
I'd love to see that story. It might feature some of my twitterfriends, sitting at a long table extending out into the distance. The conversation would just keep going and the ideas would keep flowing. Because that's the way it is in real life too. It happened to me.
photos by Bill Reynolds, taken in Austin TX in February 2008.See more at flickr
