I think for Twitter, it was the sparseness and almost ridiculous simplicity that attracted so many people. Also, the permission to talk about the trivia of one’s life without having to justify it in several paragraphs (blog) or bother one person in particular (email or other directed messages).

Second, I disagree that most people don’t mind the UI for microblogging. I hear from a lot of people that they mind it a lot. The typical answer is a lot of extra doodads and gizmos that undercut the interface’s simplicity. I think it’ll take a sharp, sharp scalpel to get this balance right.

My feeling is that there’s a lot left to do, and skilled UI designers are in short supply. So: looking forward to seeing you at BearHug.

On Identi.ca, you can seamlessly follow users on other microblogging services, so you can switch services without losing your community. (This isn’t working perfectly yet, admittedly, but it’s getting close, and it’s a high-priority goal.)

Microblogging should be like email – I can email you@hotmail.com from me@gmail.com with no problem.

“Space 4 is up for grabs.”

I howled! :-)

Thanks for the great thoughts!

By the way, I have stuck with Twitter because of how much work I have put into my community there. I get exhausted thinking about trying to get everyone to migrate to anything else, and I’ve only got a few hundred followers.

One local person I’d really like to see join Twitter is Steve Sanghi of Microchip. I think it would be a terrific move for him with regards to reaching out to the many high school students that participate in the FIRST competitions. It would be a great way to broadcast updates about the competition from his perspective–being one of the leading proponents of the program as he is. Anyway, if you ever bump into him, give him a nudge. :-)

I actually started using Twitter under a different user name, and ultimately had to delete my old user name and begin with a new, all because I had exceeded by daily allotment of followers/followees. Within approximately 1 or two months before I was introduced to the NGL team, I was struggling with the very issues that I’ve been hearing Steve Gillmor rant about.

In short – speaking from as new user’s perspective who recently struggled with the existing limitations of Twitter – I made due simply because there were no alternatives.

Fortunately, I hung around long enough to stumble into the Gillmor Gang & discover that the alternatives are being engineered right before my very eyes.

I’m excited to be a guinea pig in the project, and I encourage you to recognize that there’s potentially a lot of users out there that had the same negative experience that I did. If so, as it’s built…they will come.

Should we simply surrender because people don’t get it today? People didn’t get the Internet at first, or message boards or blogs or RSS.

It seems to me that if there is a small community who does ‘get it’, the response should be to lead rather than surrender to the masses.

Yes change is hard but often necessary. My vote goes toward change.

My mom used to hammer into me that if I was going to take the time to do something I needed to get it right the first time. What Steve is trying to do is get it right the first time.

Why should we allow the ‘big boys’ to define the infrastructure of the real time web without speaking and leading where possible?